U.S. Births Slide To Lowest Level Since 1979
April 25th, 2024Via: ZeroHedge:
This leaves us with a new report from the US National Center for Health Statistics showing US births continued a multi-decade slide to levels not seen in more than four decades.
There were 3.59 million babies born in 2023, down 2% from 3.66 million recorded in 2022. This number is the lowest since 1979, when 3.4 million babies were born.
“People are making rather reasoned decisions about whether or not to have a child at all,” Karen Benjamin Guzzo, director of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said, who was quoted by The Wall Street Journal.
Guzzo continued, “More often than not, I think what they’re deciding is, ‘Yes, I’d like to have children, but not yet.'”
America’s declining total fertility rate peaked at 3.75 births per woman after World War II and has since collapsed to about 1.617, well below the replacement rate of 2.1.
