The News
US fertility rates hit a record low last year, continuing a decades-long decline, with the number of children born falling across almost all racial and ethnic groups, according to official data released Thursday.
About 3.6 million babies were born in the US in 2023, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said, equating to a fertility rate of about 1.6 kids per woman, the lowest in more than a century. It puts the US well below the “replacement” birthrate of 2.1 — the rate at which a population is stable.
Women are opting to wait longer to have children, with older age groups seeing smaller declines in their birthrates.
The US saw a slight uptick in births following the COVID-19 pandemic — when births dropped sharply due to public health and economic concerns — before they continued once again to decline.
This trend is not unique to the US: births are declining globally, particularly in East Asia and parts of Europe. In 2000, the world’s fertility rate stood at 2.7 births per woman. As of 2023, the rate was 2.3 and falling.
SIGNALS
Decline reflects women having more choice — and more concerns
Women are having fewer children, and later, for many reasons, experts said. They have more robust careers than ever, more access to contraceptives, and more uncertainty about their economic futures. “People aren’t able to have the kids that they want,” Karen Benjamin Guzzo, director of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told The Wall Street Journal. “In a world where social mobility is limited and there’s a weak social safety net, I think a lot of people look around and say, ‘Well, maybe not.’”
In high-income countries like the US, one factor contributing to falling fertility rates is the fact that women participate in the workforce for much of their lives. The International Monetary Fund recommends investing in overall measures to boost gender equality, such as affordable childcare, to address economic pressures on those who want to start a family.
A declining birthrate hurts the economy, but immigration can help
The implications of a falling global birthrate include “higher taxes, later retirements, lower real returns for savers and, possibly, government budget crises,” The Economist wrote last year. The same is true of the declining fertility rate in the US, with a shrinking population likely to hurt the economy and programs like Social Security that have become guarantees of American life. “It has the ability to have a significant impact on the way we live for a long time to come,” an economics professor told The Wall Street Journal.
“Only net immigration can ensure population stability or growth in the aging advanced economies of the North,” economist Giovanni Peri wrote for the IMF. Immigration not only bolsters nations against population declines, it also tends to lower their overall age, which is a boon for the workforce.
Pro-family policies only work in the short-term
While the IMF and other experts have suggested that the US needs more pro-family policies to increase the number of children born, evidence shows that those policies don’t work to increase a country’s birthrate long-term.
Countries such as Sweden and Norway, which have pro-family policies such as child tax credits and paid parental leave, are still seeing declining birthrates. There’s some evidence that these policies increase the number of children born when they’re first implemented, senior Center for Community Progress fellow Adam Mallach wrote, but the gains are temporary. “No matter what governments do to convince them to procreate, people around the world are having fewer and fewer kids,” Vox reported.