Why are African-American births plummeting?

Births to American-born black women dropped 18% from 2019 to 2024. How come?

As you likely know, an increased rate of decline in births began in the US and much of the world a few years before Covid exacerbated the decline. Why the birth dearth sped up around 2017 is uncertain. There’s no obvious explanation for what was going on around 2016 to depress conception in many countries, like the economic crash of 2008 or the pandemic of 2020.

The CDC has just released provisional 2024 birthrate totals (you can find the CDC’s extensive Natality data interface here). Here in the U.S., total births were up 0.6% in 2024, although that rise is due to increasing births to immigrant mothers.

Interestingly, the CDC Natality interface allows you to distinguish between U.S.-born and foreign-born mothers, which most other federal data does not. (Apparently, you just ask people where they were born and they tell you.)

American-born women of all races had -0.7% fewer births in 2024 than in 2023, -3.4% fewer in 2024 than in 2019, and -8.3% fewer in 2024 than in 2016, indicating, perhaps surprisingly, that the current era of sharp decline began a few years before 2020, which was otherwise the turning point year for things like homicides and traffic fatalities. (The CDC’s data for “nativity” doesn’t go back before 2016).

Births to non-Hispanic white American-born mothers were down -0.6% in 2024 vs. 2023, down -7.5% in 2024 vs. 2019, and down -13.9% in 2024 vs. 2016.

What’s striking is that non-Hispanic black American-born mothers are down even more in this decade: African-American women had -5.6% fewer births in 2024 than in 2023, -18.0% fewer in 2024 than in 2019, and -19.3% fewer than in 2016. As my graph above indicates, the big decline in births to US-born black mothers has been in this decade, and it’s just accelerating as we move beyond 2020.

Why are American-born black women having sharply fewer babies in this decade?

Paywall here.

I really don’t know. It not as if blacks were out of fashion in 2020-2023.

Off the top of my head, one possibility is that the Racial Reckoning of 2020 and the temporary triumph of the Theory of Intersectionality may have led to a lot more hiring of black women into really good jobs rather than having babies. Lately, we’ve been seeing a lot of news stories about black women who got promoted to CEO jobs in 2020-2021 (individual whomwere obviously unsuited for high-ranking positions) getting eased out into spending more time with their families.

It could be that lot of black women who would have made fine mothers instead recently got promoted into high-paying jobs for which they proved unsuitable.

A more depressing explanation is that African-Americans are currently going through a bad spell despite European-Americans extolling their wonderfulness extravagantly.

For example, consider the suicide rate. One thing you used to be always be certain of was that blacks, despite all the talk about how oppressed they were, had a much lower rate suicide rate than whites. African Americans seemed to like life.

But the black suicide rate, according to the CDC, went up 24% from 2018 to 2023, while the white suicide rate went down -2%. Not long ago, blacks used to kill themselves only 3/8ths as often as whites, but lately they’ve been killing themselves almost 1/2 as much

Why did more blacks kill themselves at the peak of the era of whites trumpeting black superiority?

Perhaps blacks bought a lot more guns with the stimulus payments of 2020-2021, and thus shot themselves more? For instance, black suicides by firearm were up 55% from 2018 to 2023.

This seems like a pretty interesting question, but not one that is of much interest to people who dominated discourse around 2020.