Babies: Quantity plummeting, quality ... not so bad
Not quite all the numbers about birth trends are alarming.
Fertility is of course falling around much of the world, including in the U.S. Much of the decline in the U.S. came in the second half of the 2010s, before covid.
The CDC offers a Natality interface for looking up birth data in the U.S., but it’s a little more awkward than its Mortality interface.
Here are graphs I made for total number of births to white mothers and black mothers. I narrowed them down to non-Hispanic women born in the U.S. to reduce impact of immigration. For some reason, the CDC doesn’t make it easy to find fertility rates, so I’m looking just at two pretty stable traditional U.S. populations.
Paywall here.
Births were down 10% from 2017 to 2023 among US-born white mothers, while births to US-born black mothers were down almost 15%.
A trend that has been present since the bursting of the Housing Bubble around 2008 is that while quantity of births decline, quality increases from some perspectives. (The Bush era Housing Bubble around 2006 was the last time the U.S. total fertility rate reached the replacement rate. It was heavily driven by very high fertility among unmarried women born in Latin America: e.g., immigrant construction workers’ girlfriends.)
In contrast, from 2017 to 2023, for example, births to white teen mothers were down 38% from 2017 to 2023, while births to black teens fell 29%.
Births to unmarried white mothers fell 15% and births to unmarried black mothers declined 14%. Births to married white women dipped 7% (so the illegitimacy rate among white moms went down slightly to 28%), while dropping 15% among married black women (boosting the black illegitimacy rate to 78%).
Among white women with college degrees, total births increased 1%, and were up 5% among black women with B.A.’s or higher.
So, one of the big things that’s behind the on-going fertility decline is that the message is finally getting through to women with poor prospects (e.g., poorly educated single teen women) that maybe they shouldn’t be rushing into this baby thing.
My son plays soccer with a boy whose parents (I’m estimating) were somewhere between 15 and 18 when he was born.
It seems like total disharmony today between the parents which is neither individually nor socially optimal. But at the same time I’m slightly jealous that they are not yet 30 and have the bulk of the hard work of parenting over and done with.
From my perspective in a low fertility blue state it seems that conservative religious women and the underclass are having most of the kids. Young liberal fertility seems to have fallen off a cliff.
I wonder who is going to look after all these women when they're old. Maybe it will be like Germany when I visited in the 80s with lots of old women doing menial labor because there weren't enough men to go around after the war.