New Report Shows More US Births to Older Mothers Can’t Replace Declines at Younger Ages

A new report from the National Center for Health Statistics (PDF) quantifies the drop in U.S. births to younger women, and the (smaller) increases among older women, resulting in our declining birth rates. The data came out last year, but the analysis here includes new decompositions. This is the trend in the number of births by mothers’ age:

I’ve been trying to visualize these trends for years. Here are two new graphs from data in the report.

The first rearranges the data in the figure above to show the change in the number of births to women in each age group. They break down very nicely. In round numbers: the decreases are 400,000 fewer to women under age 20, 500,000 fewer to women 20-24, and 300,000 fewer to women ages 25-29; the increases are 200,000 among those ages 30-34, 300,000 to those ages 35-39, and 100,000 more to those age 40+. In other words: 2+3+1-4-5-3 = -6, or 600,000 fewer births in 2023 than 1990.

That gets you the change in total births. Birth rates are slightly different because the number of women in each age group has changed, too, but the story is similar. These are the changes in birth rates for each age group (with more detail among teens), with the total birth rate change. For this I scaled it to show changes from 2007, which was the last peak in birth rates. It shows the total is down 13.3 births, per 1000 women, ages 15 to 44 since 2007

In terms of rates, only women age 35 and older are at a higher level than they were in 2007.

A common question in newsrooms around the world these days is, “should we be concerned about this?” Here’s the Yahoo! News take on this report, in which I was quoted saying: “My overall take on it is that the falling fertility rates around the world and throughout history is great… It’s been incredibly important for social progress, it increases opportunities for children, gives people more choices for how to run their families and has opened up the professional world for women.”

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Previously Published on familyinequality with Creative Commons License

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