US Births drop again

Headwinds and Tailwinds for the Future of US Fertility

I’m back on Substack! Over the last 10 months I’ve been busy focusing on my new role as President & CEO of the Population Reference Bureau and moving my family to the Washington, DC suburbs. I also needed some time to figure out how to still be Jennifer Sciubba, Substack Writer and Thinker, and also head of PRB. I hope I’ve landed on it, and have a large set of topics I want to write about for the next few months, around every two weeks. My opinions will be my own, and not those of PRB. So, if you’ll permit me to keep using this Substack the way I always did—to think aloud (with only light editing to my posts), to explore population-adjacent issues I find interesting, to build community around demographic trends and analysis—without ascribing these thoughts to PRB, this can still be a great place to muse about what has become one of the hottest political and economic topics of the day: POPULATION. For my readers not familiar with PRB, however, I did want to take today to introduce you to this fabulous organization. You’ll see below a PRB-branded graph that I hope you’ll repost on social media. Now, to the news…

Data from the US CDC released today show that the US total fertility rate—the average number of children expected to be born to a woman in her lifetime if age-specific fertility rates hold—was down to 1.62 in 2023 from 1.66 the two prior years. Since 1990, when it was around replacement level of 2.1, that’s a decline of 22%, but the real decline is much more recent, taking a turn around 2007, just before the Great Recession. There were over half a million (562,195 to be exact) fewer births in 2023 than in 1990. That’s a number just shy of the population of the US state of Wyoming.

More remarkable is the shift to childbearing at older ages. Births to young teens ages 10-14 are now near zero (0.2 per 1000) and the birth rate to teens ages 15-19 is down 78% since 1990. The number of births to women over 40 years have nearly tripled during that time period, however. 2023 was the first year since 1990 that women over 40 had more babies than did teens, 147,054 versus 142,743.

Given headwinds and tailwinds, I would expect the US total fertility rate to hang out in the 1.55-1.70 range for the next decade. Births are still concentrated among those women ages 25-34, as we might expect given the biology of reproduction. The biggest shift has been the decline in teen births from 13% of all births in 1994-95 to 4.0% in recent years. While births to those over 40 are way up, as a percentage of all births they have only gone from 1.2 to 4.1%—so basically contributing the same to US births as teen births do. Let me underscore: that represents a huge decline in births overall, though, because teens used to have so many more babies. Teens in 2023 had 390,740 fewer births than in 1990, while women over 40 had only 96,809 more births in 2023 than in 1990. Here are some other headwinds and tailwinds. Feel free to drop more in the comments and let me know what you think of this list.

Headwinds

Favorable age structure: Women over age 30 had half of all US births in 2023, and the youngest Millennial women are now 29 years old, so prime reproductive years. As a group, Millennials are much larger than the Gen X women now exiting their reproductive years, so that means more potential mothers. Assisted reproductive technology may continue to help women of older ages who want to be mothers, and since the cohorts of women of those ages will be larger over the next ten years, as this population pyramid shows, that could translate to an overall bump in births.

A return to religion? The proportion of Americans who identify as Christian is stabilizing after several years of decline, and those who identify with a religion other than Christianity have been trending upwards (although still only 7.1% of the US population). There is an association between religiosity and higher fertility so the stabilization of America’s religious front may at least slow the pace of a drop in fertility.

Tailwinds

Uncertainty: Uncertainty about the future depresses fertility, and given the general sense of upheaval of the status quo that’s going on right now, there’s plenty of uncertainty and worry. Future climate change is a particular worry among Democrats (but not Republicans), as is gun violence, and both of those would be disincentives for people to have children.

Pessimism about childhood: Parents—69% of those surveyed by Pew—think it’s harder to be a teen today than in the past and worry about the influence of technology and social media on teen mental health. There’s also a reason to think technology and social media are connected to fertility, as many observers have noticed the appearance of the iPhone at the same time as fertility began its downward slope in 2007.

Neutral but notable?

Economic worries: Worry about the economy depresses fertility, but not everyone is worried. Again, there’s a split between Republicans and Democrats, with 73% of those who are or lean Republican optimistic about the economy next year, and 64% of those who are or lean Democrat expecting economic conditions to be worse a year from now. If Dems are less likely to procreate than Republicans anyway, this one may be a wash.

Political affiliation: US Republicans are more optimistic about America’s economic future, and they have higher marriage and fertility rates than Democrats, but the R-D split among Millennials—the cohort of reproductive ages—is about even (slight edge for Dems). Republicans tend to have higher birth rates than Democrats, and during the first years of the first Trump administration, the partisan gap widened by 17%. The Institute for Family Studies found that even with the 2024 election, those counties that went for Trump had higher fertility rates than blue counties. This is a relationship that they show is growing stronger over time (since 2012). As they assess, “The 20% most Republican counties [with populations over 100,000] have an aggregate total fertility rate of 1.76. The 20% most Democratic counties have an aggregate total fertility rate of 1.37, less than the EU.”

ICYMI:

I got to do this cool video with WIRED at Conde Nast’s studios in NYC a few months ago. Doing the prep work, including all of the fact checking, and recording for videos like this is a net financial loss for PRB, but important work towards increasing demographic literacy. This newsletter is free for now, but if you want to support PRB’s mission of fueling a data- and evidence-based world and help us continue to use our time towards these ends I’d appreciate your support!