Recession may have pushed US birth rate to new low
Births fell 2.6 percent last year even as the population grew,
numbers released Friday by the National Center for Health
Statistics show.
"It's a good-sized decline for one year. Every month is showing
a decline from the year before," said Stephanie Ventura, the
demographer who oversaw the report.
The birth rate, which takes into account changes in the
population, fell to 13.5 births for every 1,000 people last year.
That's down from 14.3 in 2007 and way down from 30 in 1909, when it
was common for people to have big families.
"It doesn't matter how you look at it -- fertility has
declined," Ventura said.
The situation is a striking turnabout from 2007, when more
babies were born in the United States than any other year in the
nation's history. The recession began that fall, dragging stocks,
jobs and births down.
"When the economy is bad and people are uncomfortable about
their financial future, they tend to postpone having children. We
saw that in the Great Depression the 1930s and we're seeing that in
the Great Recession today," said Andrew Cherlin, a sociology
professor at Johns Hopkins University.
"It could take a few years to turn this around," he added,
noting that the birth rate stayed low throughout the 1930s.
Another possible factor in the drop: a decline in immigration to
the United States.
The downward trend invites worrisome comparisons to Japan and
its lost decade of choked growth in the 1990s and very low birth
rates. Births in Japan fell 2 percent in 2009 after a slight rise
in 2008, its government has said.
Not so in Britain, where the population took its biggest jump in
almost half a century last year and the fertility rate is at its
highest level since 1973. France's birth rate also has been rising;
Germany's birth rate is lower but rising as well.
"Our birth rate is still higher than the birth rate in many
wealthy countries and we also have many immigrants entering the
country. So we do not need to be worried yet about a birth dearth"
that would crimp the nation's ability to take care of its growing
elderly population, Cherlin said.
The new U.S. report is a rough count of births from states. It
estimates there were 4,136,000 births in 2009, down from a year
ago's estimate of 4,247,000 in 2008 and more than 4.3 million in
2007.
The report does not give details on trends in different age
groups. That will come next spring and will give a clearer picture
who is and is not having children, Ventura said.
Last spring's report, on births in 2008, showed an overall drop
but a surprising rise in births to women over 40, who may have felt
they were running out of time to have children and didn't want to
delay despite the bad economy.
Women postponing having children because of careers also may
find they have trouble conceiving, said Mark Mather of the
Population Reference Bureau, a Washington-based demographic
research group.
"For some of those women, they're going to find themselves in
their mid-40s where it's going to be hard to have the number of
children they want," he said.
Heather Atherton is nearing that mark. The Sacramento, Calif.,
mom, who turns 36 next month, started a home-based public relations
business after having a baby girl in 2003. She and her husband
upgraded to a larger home in 2005 and planned on having a second
child not long afterward. Then the recession hit, drying up her
husband's sales commissions and leaving them owing more on their
home than it is worth. A second child seemed too risky financially.
"However, we just recently decided that it's time to stop
waiting and just go for it early next year and let the chips fall
where they may," she said. "We can't allow the recession to
dictate the size of our family. We just need to move forward with
our lives."