The fertility rate in the United States dipped 4.3% from 2020, reaching another record low for the nation.
In 2019, the rate was 58.3 per 1,000 women but decreased to 55.8 per 1,000 women in 2020 amid the coronavirus pandemic, according to provisional data from the National Center for Health Statistics.
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Among the age groups surveyed, birth rates among 15- to 19-year-olds saw the largest decrease, with a decline of 8.4%. Among 20- to 24-year-olds, the rate dropped by 5.7%, and among 30- to 34-year-olds, the rate dropped by 3.6%.
“The fact that you saw declines in births even for older moms is quite striking,” Brady Hamilton from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the lead author of the report said, according to the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
Economics experts at the Brookings Institution in December predicted that births in the U.S. had fallen by about 300,000 during 2020. Instead, births fell by about 142,000.
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Thirty-four percent of women were delaying their plans to have children or reducing the number of children they expected to have as a result of the pandemic, a Guttmacher Institute study found.
