The fertility rate in the United States has been trending down for decades, and a new report shows that another drop in births in 2023 brought the rate down to the lowest it’s been in more than a century.
There were about 3.6 million babies born in 2023, or 54.4 live births for every 1,000 females ages 15 to 44, according to provisional data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics.
After a steep plunge in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, the fertility rate has fluctuated. But the 3% drop between 2022 and 2023 brought the rate just below the previous low from 2020, which was 56 births for every 1,000 women of reproductive age.
I feel like this isn’t the right term to use for something like this.
When I hear fertility rate, I think, capability of having babies. How many people are infertile due to whatever reason, thus limiting our ability to have more children.
This should just be birth rate?
Good call-out. Further down the article they start using the term birth rate. Just another corporate-owned cable news network going for clickbaity headlines instead of reporting information.
Yup. I want kids, but I can’t in good conscience make a baby in this world.
But I’m single so it’s not like my choice is currently making a difference anyway.
People don’t want to bring babies into an unsafe world … who’d a thunk it?
I’m always reminded of this article when I see news like this:
I don’t know who this would be bad news for.
It’s bad news for people in a few decades who will need younger people to care for them in their old age.
It’s good news, however, for the planet.
It’s bad news for the wealthy because it means they’ll have less labor to exploit
Well if they wanted people to have kids perhaps they should have helped make this country one that’s worth bringing kids into.
bosses in 2039
Good news for my kids. Less scarcity for them. This is what the world needs. Less kids. Everywhere.
You have it backwatds, there will not be the same quantity of stuff divided by fewer people. There will be less of everything to begin with.
You mean more older people to support for each worker, so higher taxes on workers
That’s just fearmongering. We have enough shit to help everyone already, and we are automating jobs at a very high rate, to the point that a lot of jobs are literal unneeded bullshit.
If anything, fewer workers always meant more worker power, better organizing, higher wages, etc. Look at what happened when the oligarchic idiots got a whole generation killed in WWI. Labour won big after, since labour was scarce, while capital was not.
Unfortunately because the world runs on speculative investment, a smaller birthrate means less investment in child care, making it harder to find babysitters and daycares
Japan is already suffering from this, the birthrates are incredibly low but the daycares are packed because nobody is paying daycare workers enough, and nobody is investing enough to build new ones.
and Japan is incredibly anti-immigration
If you happen to own a human meat grinder you may consider this bad news I suppose.
- It is expensive AF to have a baby.
- It is expensive and difficult to find care for a baby while working full time or two or three jobs.
- Climate chaos is here.
- 10 mega corps run the US and believe we are all expendable.
- Our reproductive rights are being stripped.
Why anyone of us chooses to have a baby is becoming more difficult to understand.
Didn’t forget that fertility rates have dropped by 50% worldwide.
And the 10 megacorps are actually owned by the same people.
Very well said.
We noticed the dropping fertility rate as far back as 1935. The US government noted, with horror, that the fertility rate had dropped in 100 years from 7.0 to 2.1.
Since then, we’ve been steadily dropping, augmenting our fertility rate with increased immigration. But, that’s a short term solution, as immigrants usually drop from high-count families to 1 or 2 kids within two generations.
Simply put, kids are an expensive hobby with no financial upside in an industrial society.
And with every current generation, it’s going to get smaller and smaller until, within 40 or 50 years, there just won’t be enough workers/consumers to maintain the capitalist/economic system of most of the industrialized world.
Can’t wait to see what happens then.
