Later, longer...fewer Americans?
Postponement of parenthood in the US
The US Census Bureau recently published 2021 estimates for US population trends, with 73% of US counties reporting more deaths than births. Overall, the US population is still growing but there are major regional disparities. The Northeast, which has had relatively lower fertility and an older population for a while, had the highest natural decrease (deaths over births), while the Midwest and West had relatively less decrease (but yes, still a decrease). The question we should be asking is: To what degree did COVID-19 shift US demographic trends, versus intensify trends already ongoing?
That’s a question I’ll tackle over several newsletters because there’s much to say. I think there’s strong evidence that COVID didn’t so much change trends as accelerate them, and this week’s newsletter looks more closely at one piece of this: fertility trends in the US.
Before the One Child Policy, in an effort to reduce high fertility China’s leaders championed a “Later, Longer, Fewer” campaign. They hoped that if women would wait until later to marry, increase the length of time between births, and have fewer children overall, China’s population growth rate would quickly drop and it would be easier to modernize the economy. That recipe for slower population growth has been followed intentionally (through both coercive and non-coercive policies) in many regions with high fertility over the decades and it works. In fact, rather than an edict from above, social norms have shifted to favor later marriage, longer intervals, and fewer children, leading to continued fertility declines even in contexts where it is already low.
The US is one example. At the same time that my state of Tennessee is debating a bill to remove the minimum age of marriage (gross), nationally the average age of marriage is trending upwards, and the age at which American women give birth is shifting upwards along with it, across all races. According to the US Census Bureau, from 1990 to 2019, women ages 20-24 saw a 43% drop in fertility rates at the same time that rates for women ages 35-39 increased by 67%. This is a more dramatic shift than the number of births overall, which only declined from 4.1 million per year to 3.7 million over that 30-year period.
Let’s keep the focus on women for a minute. As Marshall Kosloff, host of The Realignment Podcast, asked me in our recent conversation, why are women having fewer children? (This was a juicy conversation for many reasons, so check it out!)
Demographer Lyman Stone provides convincing data that women’s childbearing ambitions are greater than their childbearing reality, and it has been that way for a while. Stone points out that the decline in number of children women say they intend to have actually came after fertility declined overall—it’s almost like it took women a minute to accept that they wouldn’t be able to have as many children as they might have wanted. One big driver of declining fertility and intentions is economic stress. As the following figure from the New York Times shows, that stress comes in many forms, from expensive childcare, to lack of family leave, to concern about the global economy writ large. I’d like to note that this survey was taken even before the pandemic.
Since financial stability increases with age for many, it’s no surprise that we see a shift away from motherhood at younger ages to older ages. In fact, fertility rates of those above age 40 have been rising since the mid-1990s, and reflect cohorts of women who have postponed childbearing. While in the past the majority of births to older mothers were third, fourth, or fifth births, today in most countries the majority are first and second births.
When demographers hear “Tik tok” they don’t think about the app, they think about the sound a biological clock makes.* Whenever I mention childbearing at older ages the subject of infertility inevitably arises. How important is assisted reproductive technology to the total number of births in a low fertility society? While it’s a few years old, this article by Éva Beaujouan and Tomás Sobotka is a useful summary of the extent to which childbearing ages have shifted across high-income countries and the role of assisted reproductive technology in contributing to the total number of births. According to the authors, “In the United States, IVF [in vitro fertilization] accounted for 11% of all live births among women aged 40 and over in 2015, and 1.8% of all live births.”
*they don’t, but it’s been a long week and I’m feeling punny
Demographer Anne Morse is the author of the Census blog post linked above on shifting fertility rates between 1990-2019 and her Twitter account is a must-follow for breaking demographic news. It’s accessible to a non-expert audience and one of my favorites for generating new ideas, like for this newsletter!