Americans gave birth to the lowest number of babies in more than four decades in 2020, a year that also saw the lowest birth rate in over a century for mothers of every race and ethnicity and in nearly all age groups, the federal government said in a new report Wednesday.
The preliminary data, compiled by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that some 3.6 million children were born in the country last year, down from about 3.75 million in 2019.
A decline was expected as the birth rate has gradually gone down for years, but the 4% drop in 2020 marked the largest single-year decrease in about 50 years. It's also twice as high as the average rate of decline for each year since 2014, according to the report.
The birth rate decreased even for women in their late 30s and in their 40s, which had been going up slightly in recent years.
© Seth WenigU.S. birth rates dropped for the fifth year in a row in 2019, producing the smallest number of babies in 35 years, according to numbers released Wednesday.
U.S. birth rates dropped for the fifth year in a row in 2019, producing the smallest number of babies in 35 years, according to numbers released Wednesday. (Seth Wenig/)
"The fact that you saw declines in births even for older moms is quite striking," Brady Hamilton, lead author of the report, told The Associated Press.
The massive decline is partly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which devastated the economy and may have caused couples to postpone their family plans, experts say.
But birth rate in the U.S. has been dropping almost every year for about a decade, and it's fallen "below replacement" levels, meaning the number of deaths every day is higher than births, according to the CDC report.
In the late 2000s, when births were booming in the U.S., the estimated fertility rate was 2.1 children per woman, a number that would ensure that generation could replace itself. That rate has now dropped to about 1.6, the lowest since health officials began tracking it more than 100 years ago.
The overall birth rate last year dropped to nearly 56 births per 1,000 women of child-bearing age, the lowest on record and about half the rate in the early 1960s, the CDC said.
The largest drop was among Asian American women, with an 8% decline. Hispanic women saw a 3% drop and Black and white women had a 4% decline.
The report was based on almost 99.9% of all birth records last year received and processed by the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics.
With News Wire Services