U.S. Birth Rate Increases for First Time Since 2014
The U.S. birth rate increased last year for the first time since 2014, according to provisional data released on Tuesday by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Vital Statistics System.
There were a total of 3,659,289 births in the U.S. in 2021, up by 1 percent from the 3,613,647 births in 2020, the NVSS noted in its report. This comes after births declined by about 2 percent per year since 2014.
The total fertility rate, or number of babies a woman is expected to have during her lifetime, increased to about 1.66 in 2021 from 1.64 in 2020. The 2020 fertility rate was the lowest since government record-keeping began in the 1930s, and came amid the Covid pandemic and concurrent shutdowns of businesses and schools.
The U.S. birthrate has declined in almost every year since 2007, except for an uptick in 2014. It is unclear if the slight rise in births in 2021 heralds a new trend in the birthrate.
“This minor blip up still leaves us on a long-term trajectory towards lower births,” Philip Levine, Professor of Economics at Wellesley College, told the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.
The news comes after data released by the National Center for Health Statistics, also a part of the CDC, showed that fewer marriages were recorded in the U.S. in 2020 than at any point in the past 50 years. The number of marriages rose only in the states of Alabama, Montana, Texas, and Utah.
