Birth Rates Last Year Still Below Replacement Level, CDC Says

An undated stock image of an infant. Christiana Bella/Pixabay

American women are still having too few babies to replace themselves and their partners, the latest national birth data suggests.

In what the U.S Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) described as a “nonsignificant decline,” the nation recorded 3,661,220 new babies in 2022, just a few thousand less than the year before.

Overall, the fertility rate was 1.665 births per woman in 2022, according to the CDC report (pdf) released this month.

For reference, a fertility rate of 2.1 births per woman is considered “replacement level,” where a generation can exactly replace itself.

“The total fertility rate in 2022 remained at below replacement,” the CDC said. “The rate has generally been below replacement since 1971 and consistently below replacement since 2007.”

Between 2014 and 2020, the rate fell at a pace of about 2 percent each year, before slightly bouncing back by about 1 percent in 2021 and then taking a very slight dip in 2022.

Numbers of live births and general fertility rates have been declining since 2014, although they slightly bounced back in 2021. U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention

In terms of age groups, the decrease in the number of births to mothers aged 15 to 19 hit a new low, representing a 78 percent decline from 1991, which was the most recent peak for teen births.

Meanwhile, there are now more mothers over the age of 35 than ever before, with women in this age group accounting for 20 percent of all women giving birth in 2022.

When it comes to racial and ethnic groups, the number of births declined 3 percent for white and Native American women and by 1 percent for black women from 2021 to 2022. At the same time, births rose 2 percent for Asian women and 6 percent for Hispanic and Pacific Islander women.

While almost every state had fewer babies in 2022 than in the previous year, Texas and Florida were the only exceptions.

Both states enjoyed a 3 percent fertility increase last year, according to the CDC data. Together, they welcomed 24,203 more newborns than they did in 2021.

By contrast, New York suffered a 1.4 percent fertility decline between 2021 and 2022, which translates to 2,875 fewer babies. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the Empire State lost a net 651,472 residents to other states from mid-2020 to mid-2022.

More Adults Don’t Expect to Ever Have Children

A survey conducted in 2021 amid the COVID-19 pandemic by Pew Research Center found that a growing share of childless American adults say they probably won’t have children someday.

According to the findings, some 44 percent of childless respondents aged 18 to 49 say it’s not too likely, or not at all likely, that they will have children in the future. By comparison, only 37 percent of adult respondents said the same in 2018.

While the reasons for not having children vary drastically, the top one (57 percent) given by childless adults is that they simply don’t want any. Other reasons include medical (19 percent), financial (17 percent), the lack of a partner (15 percent), and the age of their partner (10 percent). Some 9 percent of respondents blamed the state of the world.

An additional 5 percent cited climate change as the reason behind their desire to not have a child.

As for those who are already parents, a majority (63 percent) say they simply don’t want to have more children in the future. Others cited age (29 percent), medical reasons (23 percent), financial reasons (14 percent), and the fact that they already have kids (11 percent).

Americans’ ideal number of kids has also changed. In a long-running poll since 1936, polling company Gallup found that Americans’ views about ideal family size was around 3.5 kids from the 1930s until the mid-1960s. In the early 1980s, it fell about 2.5 or 2.6 and has remained largely unchanged since then. That’s still well above the current actual level of 1.6 lifetime births per woman.