For every 1,000 women, aged 15-44, approximately 53 gave birth last year - down from 54 the previous year, according to new data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Birth rates decreased among those up to age 29 but increased for women aged 30-44, the CDC found.
The findings are indicative of a broader U.S. trend in recent decades and one that the Trump administration and its MAGA allies, including Elon Musk, have sought to reverse.
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However, there are multiple factors complicating efforts to reverse the trend. Greater access to IUDs and birth control have helped reduce teen births, which has long been a goal for U.S. policymakers because of the complications young mothers with underdeveloped bodies face during pregnancy.
“People are able to avoid having kids at points in their life when they don’t feel it’s the right time,” Karen Benjamin Guzzo, director of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told NBC News Wednesday.
A shift in women’s education has also had a major impact. Women now make up the majority of the college-educated workforce, according to the Pew Research Center.
Those with college degrees generally have fewer children, 2022 University of Pennsylvania research shows. That’s largely because of a focus on establishing careers, traveling or finding a romantic partner.
But many women who want to have children are facing major headwinds - economic ones. The average cost of raising a child in the U.S. has ballooned to more than $300,000, the financial marketplace LendingTree says, rising nearly 2 percent from a year ago. That’s increased from $230,000 in 2000, the bank SoFi says.
And while marriage could help distribute some of that financial burden between two, fewer women are heading to the altar. The marriage rate has fallen 60 percent over the last five decades, according to 2023 research.
“Examining age-specific fertility rates, marriage rates and trends in women’s educational attainment, it is clear many women are delaying fertility and ultimately having fewer children,” the university said.
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