The American birthrate has fallen to its lowest rate in history. This has caused consternation in the political class: A falling rate can eventually lead to too few workers to support an aging population. (Immigration, the other element of population change, has fallen under the Trump administration.) Some on the right even see it as a sign of societal crisis.
I wanted to find out who was driving the decline, to better understand how to think about the phenomenon. What I found was surprising: The biggest drops were among the youngest women, who are least likely to want or be able to provide for a baby.
When I talked to young women about this, they said they wanted children but were determined to get their lives on track first. Many had come from working-class backgrounds and were trying to avoid their parents’s financial struggles.
The biggest changes are not among college-educated women.
There has been a perception that the decline is being driven exclusively by highly educated women from privileged backgrounds. But researchers found that teenagers and white women ages 20 to 24 without a bachelor’s degree accounted for over half of the drop. College-educated women accounted for another 18 percent.
Half of all 30-year-old women are childless now.
As more women delay motherhood, births are pushed to later ages. There are sharp declines in the birthrate among women in their early 20s, and declines among women in their late 20s. The result is that half of all 30-year-olds are now childless. At the same time, women in their early 30s (30 to 34) are now the group with the highest birthrate — by far. In other words, 31 is the new 21.
The oldest millennials had the same number of children as the youngest Boomers.
Another surprising finding: the number of children that women actually had over their lifetimes. The oldest millennials, born in 1984, ended up having about two children on average, which is about the same as the youngest boomers. In other words, over the course of their lifetimes, women had the same number of children, just later in life. It is unclear whether Gen Z, ages 14 to 29, will follow the same pattern.
An American woman in her early 40s is now more likely to give birth than a teenager.
In the 1980s, teenage pregnancy was so prevalent that it became a feature of the culture. But the birthrate has fallen so much for teenagers, and risen enough for women in their early 40s, that the latter group is now more likely to give birth than teenagers.
Sabrina Tavernise is a writer-at-large for The Times, focused on political life in America and how Americans see the changes in Washington.
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