Births to African-American Women Down 23% since 2019
Why are births collapsing lately among black women born in the U.S.?
There have been been many curious trends involving blacks, such as homicides and traffic fatalities, during the 2020s, the era of the Racial Reckoning, the peak of the Black Lives Matter movement.
One little noticed trend is that the number of births to African-American women who were born in the United States (i.e., non-immigrants) has collapsed 23% since 2019:
In contrast, births to U.S. born white women are down 8% since 2019. Still, note that white births began falling notably around 2017, before the current downturn in black births.
Births to US born white women fell 7% from 2016 to 2019 compared to only 2% from 2016-2019 among US born black women.
On the other hand, births to foreign-born black women went up 6% since 2019, so total black births dropped 18%.
The immigrant share of black mothers increased from 17% in 2016 to 22% in 2025.
Why aren’t African-American women having many babies anymore? Why has their total fertility rate dropped below that of white women for the first time in recorded history?
Is it tied into how the Supreme Court’s June 2022 Dobbs ruling seems to have made abortion more fashionable?
Is it related to the increase in murder and other crimes in the early 2020s?
What else is going on?
An excerpt from an email I sent Steve years ago:
"The idea is that at some point in the future, within a number of generations, the white American birthrate will become higher than the birthrate of other races. That doesn't mean it will be very high. It could still be quite low, even below replacement level, but still higher than other races.
The reason I think this could happen is that at the causative level, I think whites may be best-positioned to become adapted to the environmental effects that cause low birthrates.
Intuitively, you could say there are two ways people arrive at not having children. First, there are the people who are too smart, busy, and educated to form families. They marry late, they become buried in work. Chronologically this is the effect that came first, giving rise to the Idiocracy narrative.
But there's also a second, newer cohort - the people who are too dumb, lazy and distracted to form families. In the past, such people ended up having children mainly because they had little else to do with their time, and because the norms of birth control usage hadn't yet fully permeated their subcultures. In our world of endless cheap digital distractions, I believe that's increasingly no longer the case.
So what we have is a classic high-low effect impacting birthrates. Which race is best positioned to be the first to become adapted/resistant to such an effect? In true Rushtonian tradition, white people. The race that's smart but not too smart, motivated but not too motivated, vigorous but not too vigorous.
Furthermore, even without getting into these details, at a very high level it just seems logical that if the white birthrate was the first to crash, it will also be the first to rise. Trends are often cyclical."
I would assume it’s because in the last 5 years a lot of impulsive young men who don’t concern themselves with the consequences of their thrill seeking in sex and violence have been removed from the gene pool by the latter so there is less of the former.