Last year, the U.S. witnessed a record low in teen birthrate, as revealed by a report published on Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). However, the report suggested that further improvement might be unlikely due to the apparent plateau effect.
The CDC report indicated that teen birthrates saw a 3% drop in 2022, a smaller decrease than what had been observed in previous years. Since 2007, there has been an average annual decrease of about 8% in teen birthrates. Experts are now suggesting that this slowing down in decline may signify that the nation has reached its lower limit in this area after years of significant progress.
Brady Hamilton, the report’s lead author and a statistician and demographer at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, explained that the rates in many states have already bottomed out, reaching a point beyond which they can’t fall further. However, he also mentioned that the data included in the new report are provisional, and final numbers for 2022 are yet to be confirmed.
One of the significant contributors to the steep decline in teen births, which has fallen nearly 80% since the early 1990s, has been the increased accessibility to both contraception and comprehensive sex education. Karen Guzzo, the director of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, asserted that declining birthrates among teenagers and young adults is a positive trend as most of these pregnancies are usually unplanned. She added that this shift indicates that people are choosing to have babies when they are ready.
Birthrates among women aged 35-39 increased by 2% in 2022, the report revealed. For women aged 40-44, the birthrate rose by 4%. The birthrate among women aged 45 and older saw an even greater increase, at 12%, though the overall births to women of this age remained relatively low.
Joshua Goldstein, the director of the Berkeley Population Center at the University of California, Berkeley, highlighted that delaying parenthood is a global trend observed in all countries with low or moderate fertility rates, including most of Europe. While this is generally a positive shift, researchers are still trying to understand why it is happening. Goldstein suggested that this delay might indicate that more women are having children when they feel ready, which often comes after they’ve had opportunities to further their education, establish their careers, and find suitable partners.
The CDC report, which encompassed data from more than 99% of birth records for babies born in the U.S. last year, revealed that the overall birthrate declined marginally by less than 1% in 2022. Furthermore, except for a minor increase in 2021, the number of babies born in the U.S. has been steadily declining since 2007, with birthrates consistently falling short of the replacement rate.
However, Goldstein is not concerned about the decline in birthrate, emphasizing that the focus should be on the contributions of the next generation rather than its size. He lauds the fact that women can now have children when they are ready and invest in those children as a positive development.
Yet, the data does not provide insight into how many people are choosing not to have children at all. As both men and women are waiting until later in life to have children, it will require years of monitoring population data to determine whether or not people are opting to remain childless. Guzzo highlights that this is not just about women choosing not to have kids, as many young men are also not having children, often due to financial constraints.
Feinian Chen, a professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University, noted that the number of women in their reproductive years is also decreasing in the U.S., primarily due to the shifting age structure of the population, which has changed significantly over the last one or two decades.
However, this trend varies among immigrants. The higher birthrates among Asian and Hispanic women compared to American Indian and Alaska Natives and Black and white Americans can be attributed to younger immigrants moving to the U.S. and having children. Guzzo pointed out that immigrants have been sustaining our population rates for a long time, reinforcing Chen’s assertion.