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Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Back issues
Courthouse News Service Courthouse News Service

US Birth Rate Plummeted 4% in 2020 Pandemic

The decrease continues a six-year downward trend, but the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on birth are not yet fully known.

WASHINGTON (CN) — Marking the lowest number of births the U.S. has seen in a single year since 1979, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report Wednesday saying the number of births in the U.S. during 2020 was around 3.6 million — roughly a million less than the year before.

The drop observed by the National Center for Health Statistics marks a 4% decrease in birth rate: the largest single-year decrease in about half a century. The numbers come from a review of more than 99% of birth certificates issued in 2020.

“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,” the 11-page report says. 

Researchers caution, though, that even with the Covid-19 pandemic dominating the 2020 landscape, the uncertainty and anxiety that the public health crisis presented is unlikely to have played a role in the year’s birth decrease. Because most pregnancies last nine months, and the Covid-19 pandemic didn’t make major waves in the U.S. until March 2020, December would have been the only month one could expect to see any effect on births. 

It stands to reason that most babies born within 2020 were conceived during 2019 — a year marked by a stressful and polarizing presidential election for the country — or in the months before the pandemic took hold.

The pandemic’s effect on births will be seen more so in 2021 data, which will be shaped by a year where much of the U.S. workforce was at home, as were most school-age children, forced to navigate remote-learning policies being adopted on the fly. 

In 2020, the rate dropped for moms across all races and ethnicities and in all age groups, except 10-14 and 45-49 where it remained unchanged. Birth rates decreased by 8% for Asian American women, 6% for American Indian or Alaska Native women, 4% for Black and white women, and 3% for Hispanic women.

Birth rates for teenagers, by age of mother: United States, final 1991–2019 and provisional 2020. (National Center for Health Statistics, National Vital Statistics System, Natality, via Courthouse News)

The report also indicates that the birth rate for teen moms, age 15 to 19 years, dropped 8% from 2019 continuing its nearly 20-year downward trend, falling every year since 1991.

Marking changes that within 1 percentile, the birth rate for preterm babies declined to 10.09% in 2020 from 10.23% in 2019, and the overall cesarean delivery rate increased to 31.8% from 31.7% in 2019.

The report also notes that the U.S. fertility rate dropped in 2020 to about 1.6 kids per U.S. woman, a rate below the 2:1 ratio generally accepted as the replacement rate or amount of births needed for a population to replace itself.

The oldest millennials, the generation hitting peak childbearing years, are now between 25 and 40 years old, having entered adulthood during a period of high unemployment in the midst of the 2008 Great Recession. Many millennials are also plagued with student loan debt due to the high cost of higher education. 

Cost of child care and lack of adequate family leave for parents in the U.S. have also been bemoaned as contributing factors to the decrease in U.S. birth rate in recent years. 

Notably, the Biden administration has promised to make inroads on both issues. Under President Joe Biden’s proposed American Families Plan, low- and middle-income families would pay no more than 7% of their total income on childcare for kids under five. 

The plan also calls for investing $200 billion into universal preschool for all 3- and 4-year-old children, and seeks to increase child care workers’ wages to $15 an hour. The universal preschool program could save the typical family over $10,000 annually.

The American Families Plan also provides for 12 weeks of guaranteed paid family leave or personal leave. 

The largest number of births in a single year in recent history was in 2007 when the U.S. recorded 4.3 million.

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Categories / Health, National

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