The U. S. birthrate is down sharply since 2007, as women say economic and social obstacles prevent them from having as many children as they want.

BY JANET ADAMY – May 26, 2023 – The Wall Street Journal

My cmnt: Here in the commie, democrat-run U.S. of A. we have policies in place to discourage responsible, working people from having more babies and encourage taxpayer-dependent nonworkers, generally in fatherless homes, to have more and more babies. However nature worshiping democrats also love sacrificing babies, as sex is their religion and abortion their sacrament, and so they have been aborting inner city babies faster than they can be replaced (60+ million have been aborted since Roe v Wade) and if they should happen to reach young adulthood democrats encourage them to simply murder each other in the streets and alleys. What’s a Leftist to do? After all they still need those voters. So they have decided to illegally import welfare dependent, unskilled, uneducated, undocumented democrats to fill the bill. Can these democrat leaders be any more wicked? Absolutely, but I’ve covered that elsewhere on this website and so won’t repeat it here.

The number of babies born in the U.S. started plummeting 15 years ago and hasn’t recovered since. What looked at first like a temporary lull triggered by the 2008 financial crisis has stretched into a prolonged fertility downturn. Provisional monthly figures show that there were about 3.66 million babies born in the U.S. last year, a decline of 15% since 2007, even though there are 9% more women in their prime childbearing years.

The decline has demographers puzzled and economists worried. America’s longstanding geopolitical advantages, they say, are underpinned by a robust pool of young people. Without them, the U.S. economy will be weighed down by a worsening shortage of workers who can fill jobs and pay into programs like Social Security that care for the elderly. At the heart of the falling birthrate is a central question: Do American women simply want fewer children? Or are life circumstances impeding them from having the children that they desire?

New evidence points to the latter explanation. In a study published in January in the journal Population and Development Review, sociologists Karen Benjamin Guzzo and Sarah R. Hayford found that when millennials (born 1981 to 1996) and the oldest members of Generation Z (starting in 1997) were surveyed in their late teens and early 20s, they said, on average, that they wanted to have at least two children—just a fraction less than members of Generation X and the youngest baby boomers when they were surveyed at the same age.

But the gap between women’s intended number of children and their actual family size has widened considerably. The researchers found that by the time women born in the late 1980s were in their early 30s, they had given birth, on average, to about one child less than they planned. That is roughly double the size of the shortfall for women born two decades earlier, and it is likely too large to be erased by a spurt of childbearing in their late 30s.

These findings reflect a growing consensus among demographers that for many Americans, economic and social obstacles have become intractable deterrents to having children. Young adults can’t afford to buy a house as nice as the one their parents raised them in or to pay for childcare while they are still repaying student loans. Many men lack the earning power to be providers, because blue-collar jobs don’t pay as well and fewer men are employed. More women can’t find a suitable partner because, with their own greater education and economic status, it’s harder for them to find a man who measures up.

“People aren’t able to have the kids that they want,” said Guzzo. “There’s a growing feeling that if you were to have kids, you really need to provide something for them. You have to do all these things to give your kids advantages because the world is really tough right now. 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.’”

Leticia Quiles, a 36-year-old unemployed administrative assistant who lives in West Haven, Conn., said that she and her husband, an ATM coordinator, talked about having two children before they got married a decade ago. “We had definitely planned on having children at some point, but because of the economy and the time that you need to put aside for children, it’s not something we can do,” she said. “We can barely take care of ourselves let alone take care of a child.” Instead, Quiles helps to care for her nieces and nephews, babysitting them and taking them for outings like wall climbing. “I get my fill,” she said.

Some young people say that by not having children, they’re helping to solve other global problems. “To me it feels borderline unethical to even be having kids with the way the future is looking in terms of climate change and resource shortages and all of that,” said Cara Pattullo, a 31-year-old urban and environmental planner who lives with her boyfriend in Chicago. Instead, she thinks that she might adopt or foster children when she gets older, or forego childrearing altogether.

To maintain current population levels, the total fertility rate—a snapshot of the average number of babies women have over their lifetime—must stay at a “replacement rate” of 2.1 children per woman. In 2021, the U.S. rate was 1.66. Had fertility rates stayed at their 2007 peak, the U.S. would now have 9.6 million more kids, according to Kenneth Johnson, senior demographer at the University of New Hampshire.

Federal agencies are treating the slump like a temporary downturn. The Social Security Administration’s board of trustees projects that the total fertility rate will slowly climb to 2 by 2056 and hold there until the end of the century. Yet it’s been over a decade since fertility rates reached that level. Last year there were 2.8 workers for every Social Security recipient. That ratio is projected to shrink to 2.2 by 2045, roughly two-thirds what it was in 2000.

Some other developed countries are in a far deeper childbearing trough than the U.S. In South Korea, the total fertility rate hit a world record low of 0.84 in 2020 and has since sagged to 0.78. Italy’s rate slid to 1.24 last year. China’s population fell in 2022 for the first time in decades because its fertility rate has been far below the replacement rate for years. Its two-century reign as the world’s most populous country is expected to end this year when India overtakes it, if it hasn’t already.

In a recent note to clients, Neil Howe, a demographer at Hedgeye Risk Management, pointed to a World Bank report showing that the 2020s could be a second consecutive “lost decade” for global economic growth, in large part because of worsening demographics. By 2026 or 2027, he wrote, the growth rate of the working-age population in the entire high-income and emerging-market world will turn from slightly positive to slightly negative, reversing a durable driver of economic growth since the Industrial Revolution.

This shift will make the U.S. more dependent on immigration to supply enough workers to keep the economy humming. Immigrants accounted for 80% of U.S. population growth last year, census figures show, up from 35% just over a decade ago. Yet the number of young immigrant women coming to the U.S. has diminished, Johnson said, and the decline in fertility has been greatest among Hispanics.

Having fewer children has already changed the social fabric of the country’s schools, neighborhoods and churches. J.P. De Gance, president and founder of Communio, a nonprofit that helps churches encourage marriage, said that lower marriage and birth rates are one of the largest drivers of the decline in religious affiliation that’s left pews empty across the country. That matters for the whole community, De Gance said, because churches give lonely people a place to form friendships, as well as feeding hungry people and running schools that fill gaps in public education. “When that’s diminished, the entire culture’s diminished,” he said.

One reason the U.S. has fewer children is that the teen birth rate has plunged 78% since its peak in 1991. Greater access to contraception, including long-acting methods such as intrauterine devices, has helped curb unplanned pregnancies that prompt the youngest women to halt their education and become mothers before they’re ready.

Whether the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision allowing states to prohibit abortion will materially lift the number of births is an open question. In 2017, the national abortion rate reached its lowest level since Roe v. Wade legalized the procedure in 1973, before drifting up over the next three years, according to data from the Guttmacher Institute, a policy group that supports abortion rights. There were about 930,000 abortions performed in the U.S. in 2020, the most recent year for which figures are available.

Kathryn Kost, Guttmacher’s director of domestic research, said that new state-level restrictions on the procedure will make it harder to track abortions. “These laws push it underground,” she said. In a recent paper, Kost and co-authors found that between 2009 and 2015, there was a drop in the rates of women who said they got pregnant too soon. At the same time, older women saw an uptick in pregnancies they described as happening later than they desired.

The median age at which women give birth is 30, three years older than it was in 1990. Despite advances in fertility treatments, women who delay having kids until their final childbearing years reduce their chances of doing so—not just because it narrows their biological window but because other priorities and roadblocks can more easily derail their plans.

“Right now I think we’re one and done,” said Hester Graves, a 42-year-old math researcher at a think tank who lives outside Washington, D.C. After giving birth to her daughter four years ago, she hemorrhaged and had to undergo surgeries and blood transfusions: “I would love to have a second. I don’t know that I can risk my life to have a second.”

U.S. policymakers are looking for solutions to the falling birth rate. President Joe Biden has proposed a series of measures aimed at aiding parents, including paid family leave, subsidized child care and federally funded preschool, though they’ve stalled amid opposition from lawmakers who say they’re too expensive. Former president Donald Trump, who is trying to return to the White House in 2024, recently said that he supports paying out “baby bonuses” to fuel a reproductive boom.

Demographers say that it takes years of large-scale programs to spur childbearing. France, which has one of the highest fertility rates in the developed world, has long invested in pro-natalist policies including subsidized child care. Other countries are catching up. Hungary recently exempted women under the age of 30 who have a child from paying personal income tax.

Pilar Muner, a 34-year-old married human resources executive at a tech company, said that her desire to have children has run up against a series of deterrents, including long Covid. She doesn’t want to waltz into parenthood like her mother and father’s generation did: “You had more kids than you could afford. You smoked cigarettes when you were pregnant. Not a lot of thought went into it,” said Muner, who lives outside Boston. “I think I’m just not ready.”

For now, she is exploring freezing her eggs. “I have a lot of things I enjoy that have made me really happy,” she said. “I don’t want to feel like parts of my life are being compromised.”

Anthony DeBarros and Paul Overberg contributed to this article.

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Appeared in the May 27, 2023, print edition as ‘Why Americans Are Having Fewer Babies’.