WASHINGTON — Propelled by a strong economy and more women of childbearing age, total U.S. births rose 2 percent in 1998, the first increase since 1990, the government reported Tuesday.
Many of the women who had babies were on their own — births to unwed mothers reached an all-time high. But researchers said it wasn't teenagers fueling the baby boomlet; it was twenty- and thirtysomething daughters of baby boomers who had their own kids but didn't always get married first.
"As the economy gets better, people have more children," said Dr. Gabriel Escobar, a perinatal researcher with Kaiser Permanente, a health maintenance organization. "But most of the increase is because there are more people entering the childbearing years."
There were 3.94 million births in 1998, or about 14.6 for every 1,000 females, the report by the National Center for Health Statistics showed. In 1997, 3.88 million children were born and the rate of births was slightly lower at 14.5 per 1,000.
The increase was the first since 1990, when 4.1 million children were born. Between 1990 and 1997, the number of births fell 7 percent as women waited longer to have children and teen births declined amid the availability of more reliable contraceptives, an emphasis on abstinence and fears about AIDS.
Nearly one-third of the 1998 babies were born to unmarried women, the report said. Some 1.29 million babies were born to single women in 1998, up 3 percent from the prior year and the highest number reported since the government started collecting birth data in the early 1900s.
Stephanie Ventura, the report's lead author, said there are simply more single women entering childbearing years than there were in the early 1990s.
"When you look behind the birth numbers you'll see an increase in the number of unmarried women," said Ventura.
Teen birthrates were down 2 percent to 51.1 birth per 1,000 teens — an 18 percent drop from 1991.
But birthrates for all women in the 20s and 30s was on the rise. After falling during the 1990s, the birth rate for women between 20 and 24 — the principal childbearing ages — rose 1 percent to 111.2 births per 1,000. The rate for women aged 30 to 34 rose 2 percent to 87.4 births per 1,000 women — the highest rate since 1965.