Birth Rates Hit a Record Low

Birth Rates Hit a Record Low

By Caitlin McGlade, CQ Staff

The percentage of American women having babies hit an all-time low last year, including a demographic that astounded researchers: teenagers.

The teen birth rate dropped 8 percent from 2010 to 2011 — from 34.2 per thousand girls age 15 to 19 who had a child in 2010 to 31.3 per thousand teens who gave birth in 2011. Those rates are about half of what they were a decade ago.

“These trends over all have been tremendous and to see continuing decline is really very heartening,” Leslie Kantor, vice president for education at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in an interview. “This tells us that this is, in fact, a solvable problem.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics released 2011 data Wednesday, which also reported that fewer unwed women are having children as well. The numbers have been trending this way for a few years.

Brady Hamilton, a statistician who wrote the report, said the numbers reflect a birth rate decline in 19 states. The remaining 31 states, including the District of Columbia and U.S. territories, showed only marginal changes, if any. The CDC’s report does not include statistics from foreign mothers who are not in the United States legally but give birth to children here.

Hamilton couldn’t peg any causes to the geographic differences but said that his team’s final report, which will be published in about six months, will include more insight into those details.

Hamilton surmised that the drop in general birth rates could be an effect of the economic downturn. The number of births took a sharp dive around 2008, mimicking a similar drop in births that followed the Great Depression.

But this doesn’t mean that women are foregoing motherhood — the percentage of women ages 40 to 44 having children has been steadily rising since the 1990s.

“These could be births that have been postponed,” Hamilton said in an interview. “For a woman in her 20s, that’s an option if the economy doesn’t look good. For older mothers, that’s not as viable as an option.”

But for teenagers?

Kantor said typical 15 year old girls aren’t thinking about the economy — but more of them are thinking about birth control. In 1988, about 33 percent of girls aged 15 to 19 used no method of contraception, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But decades later, from 2006 to 2010, the number dropped to 21.7 percent. Male teens, too, have used contraceptives at higher rates. Fourteen percent fewer male teens neglected to use contraception in 2006 to 2010, compared to the figures in 1988.

Kantor attributed the trends to a shift in sex education quality and parental involvement. More schools are engaging in programs that require intellectual participation over multiple classes and more parents are talking to their kids, she said.

About $180 million in federal funding started being dispersed in 2010 for evidence-based sexual education programs, she said.

“It’s not so much quantity as it is quality . . . we really have a better sense of what we need to do with young people,” she said. “Rather than doing the one-time 45-minute assembly and thousands of kids are in there and that’s it, I think folks, with me, really fight schools when they call us and ask us to do that. Give me a program with eight sessions and I can teach people to wait to have (intercourse) or use contraception.”

With fewer and fewer women bearing children, the U.S. has reached an average of about 1.9 children per woman. What does this mean for the future of our population?

Other countries with declining populations are faring worse, Hamilton said. Japan, for example, is estimated to contract by one-third by 2060 and is starting at a future of a bloated population of elderly weighing on the shoulders of thinning younger generations.

“One-point-nine births per woman . . . that number is below what we call the replacement level, which is about 2.1, but don’t forget that you have a high level of immigration that makes up for that,” Hamilton said. “I don’t think we’re going down the same patch as Japan because we have that high level of immigration into the country.”