WASHINGTON — The fertility rate in the United States fell in 2018 for the fourth straight year, extending a steep decline in births that began in 2008 with the Great Recession, the federal government said on Wednesday.

There were 59.1 births for every 1,000 women of childbearing age in the country last year, a record low, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. The rate was down by 2 percent from the previous year, and has fallen by about 15 percent since 2007.

In all, there were 3,791,712 births in the country last year, the center said in its release of final birth data for 2018.

Fertility rates are essential measures of a society’s demographic balance. If they are very high, resources like housing and education can be strained by a flood of children, as happened in the postwar Baby Boom years. If they are too low, a country may find itself with too few young people to replace its work force and support its elderly, as in Russia and Japan today.

In the United States, declines in fertility have not led to drops in population, in part because immigration has helped offset them.

The country has been living through one of the longest declines in fertility in decades. Demographers are trying to determine whether it is a temporary phenomenon or a new normal, driven by deeper social change.

Fertility rates tend to drop during difficult economic times, as people put off having babies, and then rise when the economy rebounds. That is what happened during and after the Great Depression of the 1930s. But this time around, the birthrate has not recovered with the economy. A brief uptick in the rate in 2014 did not last.

“It is hard for me to believe that the birthrate just keeps going down,” said Kenneth M. Johnson, a demographer at the University of New Hampshire.

Mr. Johnson estimated that if the rate had remained steady at its 2007 level, there would have been 5.7 million more births in the country since then.

The decline in 2018 was broad, sweeping through nearly all age groups, and reflected a long, gradual shift in American childbearing to later in the mother’s life. The rate fell most steeply among women in their teens — down 7.4 percent from the year before. Births to teenagers have fallen by more than 70 percent since 1991.

Women in their 20s had fewer babies last year as well. Historically, women in their late twenties usually had the highest fertility rates of all, but they were overtaken in 2016 by women in their early 30s, reflecting a trend of later childbearing throughout American society.

The only age groups that recorded increases in fertility rates in 2018 were women in their late 30s and early 40s.

“It’s clear that the traditional age-fertility pattern that held for Baby Boomers and Gen X women is shifting,” said William Frey, senior demographer at the Brookings Institution.

He noted that more than half of women who had children in their late 30s last year had college degrees, according to the new data — a much larger proportion than among women who had children in their late 20s.

That could be a clue that deeper social forces are at work. A generation of millennial women appears to be delaying having children even longer than Gen X women and Baby Boomers did, to get on a firm footing professionally and financially before starting a family.

“The data suggest that people want to establish themselves before having children,” said Alison Gemmill, a demographer at Johns Hopkins University. “They also want to make sure they have adequate resources to raise quality children.”

Other sweeping social changes have accompanied the delay in childbearing. New data from the Census Bureau show that the median age of first marriage is now 28 for women and nearly 30 for men; in 1970, the median ages were 21 and 23, Mr. Frey said.

“This is a far cry from the 1950s, or even the 1980s and the 1990s,” he said.

The fertility decline may seem alarming, Professor Gemmill said, but a lot about it is good. Teen pregnancy is way down, as are unintended pregnancies, which had long set the United States apart from other developed countries. She noted that American women generally do have children eventually, and that childlessness is waning. By her mid-40s, the typical woman has had two children, she said.

“Is it a permanent shift? We just don’t know yet,” Professor Gemmill said.

If it is, she said, “there might be implications for society at large, say for funding Social Security — but I don’t think we are there yet.”

Source: Read Full Article