The U.S. birthrate took another tumble in 2020, according to provisional government data, falling 4% to just under 56 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age. That’s the steepest single-year decline in a half-century, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention vital statistics report released Wednesday.
Changes in a country’s birthrate are not just an interesting datapoint. Birthrates are intertwined with safety net programs, school viability, economic growth or stagnation and more.
And while some experts had predicted the pandemic would increase the number of births in 2020 because people would be at home together more, that turned out not to be the case. As The New York Times reported, “births were down most sharply in December, when babies conceived at the start of the health crisis would have been born.” Births declined about 8% in December, compared to December 2019.
Among the CDC report’s highlights:
- The number of births declined for the sixth year in a row to 3.6 million, also down 4% from the previous year. The birthrate declined the most, 8%, among teens ages 15 to 19.
- At the same time, the rate of caesarian deliveries rose to nearly 32% in 2020 — and the low-risk cesarian delivery rate increased to just shy of 26%.
- Meanwhile, the preterm birthrate fell to just over 10%, which is the first decline in that rate since 2014. Preterm includes babies born before 37 weeks gestation.
- Provisional birthrates didn’t change for adolescents 10 to 14 and for women ages 45-49.
“The declining birthrate is just one piece of America’s shifting demographic picture. Combined with a substantial leveling-off of immigration, and rising deaths, the country’s population over the past decade expanded at the second-slowest rate since the government started counting in the 18th century,” wrote Sabrina Tavernise, of The New York Times. “The pandemic, which pushed the death rate higher and the birth rate even lower, appears to have deepened that trend.”
Attention to the trend has been broad. Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, recently cited it as one of the factors behind his decision to sponsor a bill that would pay a modified child tax credit monthly to families to make raising a family more affordable. He proposes giving $250 a month for school-age children and $350 a month for younger kids, subject to relatively high income limits. It would be administered by the Social Security Administration.
That Family Security Act would “make it easier for people to form families and to have children and to be able to provide for the children after they’re born,” he told the Deseret News. Romney predicts the financial help could give people confidence they could afford having kids, and maybe even convince some women not to have an abortion. Society in general would benefit from more kids, he said.
The United States has for some months been below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman of childbearing age that would keep the population stable without relying on immigration. If American women have babies at existing rates, they are predicted to average 1.78 children during their childbearing years, generally viewed as ages 15 to 44.
The Deseret News recently explored what that says about the future of housing sales, Social Security and college, among other impacts.
The reasons behind the decrease are varied, but include fewer teens having babies, women waiting longer to become mothers and women may be having fewer babies than they would like to have because they’re starting later.
Others suggest that couples are fearful of having children because of the high cost and a lack of assurance that they will be able to afford them.
Demographer Lyman Stone, a research scholar at the Institute for Family Studies, worries that women might not be able to have the number of children they want. He’s also concerned that with fewer children, people might be more lonely and more of them could be impoverished than would otherwise have been.
“Really, it comes down to support for young families and restructuring the institutions of work and home life in a way that younger people will feel economically secure in having more kids,” Pam S. Perlich, director of demographic research for the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute at the University of Utah, told the Deseret News.
There are other fears, too, like whether a dwindling population can provide an adequate workforce, entrepreneurship and fuel a robust economy. Another concern is whether schools and universities will need to downsize as the number of students declines.
One of the biggest questions is how much pressure a workforce can take in an “inverted pyramid” where fewer workers are expected to shoulder the costs of government programs, including Medicare and Social Security, that serve a larger previous generation. Additionally, wealth is often held in the form of home and property ownership, but cashing it out depends on having a pipeline of willing buyers, Stone said.
Fewer births long term could impact rich and poor, old and young, which reaches across ethnic and racial backgrounds, he said.
The data in the new vital statistics release included 99.87% of all 2020 birth certificates collected by the National Center for Health Statistics as of Feb. 11, 2021. Data from 2019 is considered final, not provisional.