U.S. Birth Rate Hit Record Low Last Year, Signaling Surge in Childlessness – Emily Mangiaracina 5/1/24

Source: LifeSiteNews.com

The U.S. birth rate hit a record low last year of 1.62 births per woman according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), part of a worldwide trend of declining birth rates that have been shown to stem from rising childlessness.

The U.S. has had birth rates mostly below replacement level since 1972, according to United Nations (U.N.) data, with a minor brief respite from 2006 to 2007, when birth rates were just at replacement level. Birth rates hovered near replacement level from about 1989 to its recent peak of 2.11 births per woman in 2007. Since then, the birth rate has steadily declined.

The new CDC data shows that the birth rate for women ages 20 to 24 has seen a particularly steep decline of 47 percent since 2007. From 2022 to 2023 alone, the number of births for this age group dropped 4 percent.

As data analyst Stephen Shaw has documented in his film “Birthgap,” declining birth rates not just in the U.S. but around the world are being driven not by smaller family sizes but by an “explosion” in childlessness.

By comparing statistics on first-time mothers and the number of children they go on to have with national fertility rates, Shaw found that childlessness rates skyrocketed within only a few years in many countries.

For example, in Japan in 1974, one in 20 women were childless. By 1977, this ratio was one in four, and by 1990, it had reached one in three, a statistic that held in 2020. While Shaw doesn’t give specific numbers for most countries, he shares that most have become, like Italy and Japan, “childless nations,” where one-third or more people will become “childless for life.”…

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