From Baby Bust to Ongoing Fertility Collapse (Just Kidding)

Elon Musk, sharing a post that said “humanity’s birthrate is collapsing,” added that America is “trending toward extinction!” Of course any decline in fertility rate is “trending toward extinction,” and that has been the case in the US almost every year since 2007, but still we probably shouldn’t let people who are this prone to catastrophizing have billions of dollars of disposable income.

Anyway, this post is a about US fertility trends now that we have provisional birth data for 2023.

I talked a lot about a pandemic Baby Bust a few years ago, including in a little paper and to the news media. The US birth decline in 2020 was dramatic, as it was in a number of other countries. We have since learned that fluctuations in migration patterns drove some of that decline. Now we can step back a little and put the pandemic events in wider perspective.

First, a long view. This goes back to 1933, the beginning of the series maintained by the Human Fertility Database. This shows that the crude birth rate (births per 1000 people) — which is the essential element in contemporary population growth, has fallen to its lowest level on record: 10.7. And in total births, the last time we had fewer than 3.6 million was 45 years ago, when our population was one-third smaller.

The total fertility rate — a projection of lifetime births per woman based on each year’s birth rates — is now again at its lowest level ever (1.62), lower than the Baby Bust year of 2020 (1.64).

With this historical perspective, we can identify the current era as the post-2007 period of fertility decline, which began with what we used to call the Great Recession. (I have previously argued that these declines were more associated with hard times and insecurity than with improving economic opportunity for women, but I haven’t updated that analysis with post-pandemic data yet.)

Looking at the post-2007 decline allows us to evaluate the scale of the 2020 disruption and 2021-22 rebound. This figure shows percent change in four measures of fertility since 2007, and what would have happened if the 2007-2019 trends had continued in a linear fashion.

In 2023 total births were down 16.8% from 2007, compared with 17.6% if the linear trend had continued, so we’re a little above the pre-pandemic trend. However, in terms of total births we are dead even: There were 14.5 million births from 2020 through 2023, the same number as would have occurred on the linear trend. The pattern for the general fertility rate (births per woman ages 15-49) is similar: the post-2020 rebound has receded and we are back on the linear trend from 2007.

The total fertility rate, representing projected lifetime births based on each year’s age-specific rates, dropped markedly in 2023 but remains above the post-2007 trend line. The long-term decline in TFR has slowed since 2019, in other words. That’s the most complicated measure on here, and I don’t have a clear explanation for it yet. The crude birth rate (the same measure as the first graph above) is 25 percent below the 2007 — kind of astounding — but we are also still a above the post-2007 trend. One thing this would reflect at least in part is the increased mortality at older ages, so there are fewer people not having children contributing to the denominator.

Finally, below is an update to a figure I have been tracking for years now, showing relative changes in birth rates by age. Here I scaled it to show the differences from our peak year of 2007. First look at the years before 2007, which show that the rising birth rates at the time were driven entirely by women over age 24. This reflected a shift to births at older ages, especially from the teenage years. After 2007 the rising age pattern continues, but increases now only appear above 35 (age 45+ is not included in these numbers because it’s not in the older reports). Thus the pattern of delay has shifted to an overall decline. The percentage increase in births at older ages is a little misleading — their birth rates are still many times lower than those of women in their twenties. Note, of course, today’s older women are yesterday’s younger women; a 40-year-old new mother today didn’t have a baby at age 20 in the year 2003 (and then maybe another at 23). Note, finally, that 2023 was the first year since at least 1989 (besides 2020) that were were no increases in birth rates for women at any age. (Even among women age 45-54, only 1.1 in a thousand of whom had a birth last year, there was no increase in 2023.)

In conclusion, the decline in the total fertility rate has slowed since the pandemic year of 2020, but the post-bust rebound has faded and we are mostly back on trend with the long-term decline that began in 2007. The continued shift toward childbearing at older ages is not replacing births at younger ages — it is a decline as well as a delay. I’m not aware of any reason to suspect this is going to change any time soon, and there is still a long way left to fall (and even longer to reach extinction).

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Previously Published on familyinequality with Creative Commons License

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