The number of births in the U.S. fell by 4 percent last year — the largest annual decrease in more than a century. Before the pandemic, Americans were already having fewer children, doing it later in life or choosing not to have children at all.
New provisional data released last week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows the U.S. birth rate has dropped for six consecutive years. Roughly 3.6 million babies were born in the U.S. in 2020, a decline from around 3.75 million in 2019, making 2020 the lowest number of births since 1979. The drop from 2019 to 2020 is also the largest one-year drop in births percentage-wise since 1965, the year the baby boom ended.
National births declined by about 8 percent in December compared to the same month the year before, according to a monthly breakdown from the CDC. December, the month when many babies conceived at the beginning of the pandemic would have been born, had the largest decline of any month in 2020, signaling the pandemic lockdown may have made people more apprehensive about starting a pregnancy.
“This is the sixth consecutive year that the number of births has declined after an increase in 2014, down an average of 2% per year, and the lowest number of births since 1979,” the National Center for Health Statistics said.
The Minnesota birth rate has also been on the decline for years, with the 2019 rate sitting at 11.71 births per 1000, compared to 14.16 per 1,000 in 2007, according to CDC data. This rate of decline matches the national trend.
“We haven’t had replacement level fertility in Minnesota since 2006,” said Megan Dayton, a senior demographer at the Minnesota State Demographic Center. Replacement level fertility is 2.1 births per woman, a number that would “replace” two parents, with the additional 0.1 to account for infant fatalities. “Now, the birth rate has decreased every year since and we’re nearing 1.75 births per woman.”
Despite maintaining population growth since the last census in 2010, Minnesota’s declining birth rate could be a problem for the state. But it could also be a good sign for women, experts say.
Potential factors for the decline
Births tend to dip after economic crises, as women who are able to delay having babies do so because of uncertainty in jobs and income. In the 1930s, for example, the birth rate dropped sharply after a stock market crash that led to the Great Depression. But it picked up a few years later, mirroring the economic recovery.
After the Great Recession in 2008, birth rates dropped again. This time, though, the decline has continued despite improvements in the economy.
“Minnesota is still around 78% white non-Hispanic and [that demographic] has a very low fertility rate having the fewest babies of any race group in Minnesota,” Dayton said. “And so births in the last 30 years have increasingly been ticking down every single year for white non-Hispanic mothers, so any growth that we did see in the past has come from people of color or from mothers who identify as a race that is not white non-Hispanic.”
The 2020 birth rate for teenagers was down by 8 percent compared with 2019, and data shows that teenagers have had the sharpest decline in births since 2007, down by 63 percent. This is a change from several decades ago, when unintended pregnancies were high among teenagers — today the average age at first birth is 27, up from 23 in 2010.
This trend could be attributed to the increased use of birth control or contraceptive methods in the last decade or to better education on unintended pregnancies.
Some women have also chosen to delay or forgo having children because of the sheer cost of child care services throughout a child’s life. The economics of the industry make costs high and prohibitive to many people who want to continue to work after having children.
The child care “crisis” led Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith to propose a $50 billion plan aimed at boosting the child care industry, and the massive child care bailout in a COVID-19 stimulus package cemented the idea that the industry needed help.
A group of Democratic senators including Smith and Sen. Amy Klobuchar also introduced the Marshall Plan for Moms, a resolution that lawmakers hope will pave the way for stronger legislation to support mothers in the U.S. The resolution calls for a paid leave plan and funding to stabilize the child care industry that would create a more permanent support network for child care providers.
The downsides of a declining birth rate
The decrease in the country’s birth rate has been going on for decades, so this drop does not come as a huge surprise to experts familiar with population trends.
Minnesota demographers have found that if current trends continue, the number of deaths will outpace the number of births in Minnesota around the year 2040. Once the state reaches that point, any growth in Minnesota will have to come from people moving from other states or from outside the country.
A declining population could have consequences for the state. If Minnesota’s decline in birth rate outpaces the rest of the nation and the population shrinks enough, the state could, on the national level, lose some of its representation in Congress. Minnesota came close to this as announced in the 2020 Census results — had the state counted 26 fewer people, Minnesota would have lost its eighth seat in the House of Representatives.
Fewer people can also mean less federal funding for social services and programs (but there would also eventually be less demand for some services as babies age). But perhaps most concerning from the financial perspective, an aging population could also result in the failure of services like Social Security or pensions.
“We call it the dependency ratio, where you take the number of children age zero to 18 and add them to the 65-plus population, and then the balance is divided by the number of workers,” Dayton, from the state Demographic Center, said. “If you have a dependency ratio that is above one, you have more people who are receiving government services than paying them.”
This population change could strain government budgets and make life more difficult for people who are aging out of the workforce without a self-built safety net.
Potential upsides to a declining birth rate
The declining birth rate in the U.S. and in Minnesota is not all doom and gloom — as mentioned earlier, it could be a sign of a drop in unintended pregnancies, especially among teenagers.
The change could also help people economically, Dayton said.
“In the short term, a low fertility rate can actually raise the per capita income by lowering a family’s cost of child rearing and boosting the share of working age people,” Dayton said. “But as fertility continues to fall, people — women, especially, because we’re having the babies — tend to spend more time working, which affords them the ability to accumulate more savings. It gives them more experience, maybe a better paying job.”
The declining birth rate could also call attention to the barriers that women face when deciding if and when to have children, potentially signaling to the government that an aging population will no longer be able to create enough tax revenue to support government programs like Social Security or pensions.
“In this sense, the babies that are being born are the bellwether for our demographic future,” Dayton said.
Correction: This story has been corrected to accurately state the margin by which Minnesota kept its eighth U.S. House seat.
From an environmental perspective, a declining population is one of the best things that can happen. There will be short term economic dislocations as we have less workers supporting more older people, but hopefully this will be offset by increasing robotics and other technologies that can increase productivity.
The normal human gestation period is nearly 10 months (it’s 40 weeks, and babies born at 9 months are actually preemies). That means that only those babies born prematurely in 2020, or were born very late in December 2020, were conceived since the country shut down due to the pandemic (March 2020 + 10 months is January 2021). That is, we have no idea how the pandemic actually affected birth rates (meaning that the title of this article is misleading).
What we’re seeing in the 2020 data is about what was happening prior to March 2020, mostly in 2019. Yet, there’s no real analysis as to why, specifically in 2019, there was such a huge drop in pregnancies. Why was 2019 different from 2016-2018? Why didn’t we see a stabilization/increase after enactment of Obamacare (maybe it did stabilize a bit?)? Is the rebound after the Great Depression the result of access to “day care” (women didn’t work outside the home as often), whereas after 2008, women were more likely to have to return to work in-part because there is no guaranteed maternity leave? If so, then what do birth rates look like after economic crises for women who have access to maternity leave vs those who don’t? I know that all of this is probably fodder for several articles, but I would have hoped that there might have been a bit more analysis as to why 2019 resulted in such a big drop in births in 2020, which was bigger than the general decline for the last 10+ years. The potential causes are very generic to the last 10+ years (at least).
One of the upsides to this particular drop is that there might be fewer people who have been strained financially, physically, and/or mentally during the pandemic might have been spared one more stressor (babies can be a joy, but even when they’re a joy, they are still a source of stress). On the downside, those who might have had the opportunity to spend a whole year at home with a baby that they might not have had without taking an even bigger career/financial hit before, weren’t able to take that opportunity.
High unemployment, with potential loss of insurance coverage, problematic access to healthcare in a pandemic year and limited access to one’s support system of family and friends. Expected most of these impacts in 2021 given the 9 month lag time. Also, limiting the number of refugees and immigrants, who tend to be in the child bearing age groups had to have had an impact. Many factors cone into play.
And further looking at that decline, will the ratio of the people pulling the wagon versus riding the wagon change?
Less people in general to support the aging population, but also people willing to work hard and get taxed even more.
We already do. Gen X (at least the later part of it) will likely get only 80% of the SS benefits Boomers enjoy. Somewhere around 2035 (or earlier), which is when the oldest Xers are just hitting 70 years of age (which also happens to be full retirement age for SS), the SS trust fund will run out. That is, at that point, not only will retirees be getting back less than what they paid in (on average), but the money anyone pays in at that point will be earning no interest and going from working peoples’ pockets directly into retirees’ pockets. Unless the laws change around how SS is funded, SS will be in a death spiral with diminishing returns to retirees over time. And, unless Congress acts, the SS Administration will have to find ways to delay or reduce payments to retirees without any actual legal means to do so.
On the bright side, lots of people will save lots of money not having children because child care and education are so expensive, so maybe they’ll have private retirement funds anyway! (Right…)
Sorry Rachel but what wage earners are taxed towards their Social Security benefits has absolutely no bearing on what will be available for them to collect in the future. That’s simply right-wing rhetoric. What the federal government spends has nothing to do with the taxes it collects and destroys upon receipt. The idea that tax collections fund the federal government is simply incorrect.