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Could These Plummeting Fertility Rates Send the U.S. into a Population Crisis?

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Earlier this week, columnist Kurt Schlichter had a piece out there, “Conservatives Need To Get It On.” He has a point. The CDC just released figures which show that birth rates are down. According to the report:

The provisional number of births for the United States in 2020 was 3,605,201, down 4% from the number in 2019 (3,747,540) (Tables 1–3 and Figure 1). This is the sixth consecutive year that the number of births has declined after an increase in 2014, down an average of 2% per year, and the lowest number of births since 1979 (3,8,9).

There’s more than COVID, though, to do with this consistent trend. As Janet Adamy with the Wall Street Journal reported in quoting experts:

Because the Covid-19 pandemic emerged in March, the figures capture just a short period at year’s end when the unfolding health and economic crisis could be reflected in women’s decisions about getting pregnant. Women typically have fewer babies when the economy weakens. Fears of getting sick, making medical appointments and delivering a baby as a deadly virus spread also dissuaded some women from pregnancy. . .

Demographers say the data suggests that more fundamental social and economic shifts are driving down fertility. Births peaked in 2007 before plunging during the recession that began that year. Although fertility usually rebounds alongside an improving economy, U.S. births fell in all but one year as the economy grew from 2009 until early 2020.

(Read more from “Could These Plummeting Fertility Rates Send the U.S. into a Population Crisis?” HERE)

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CDC: U.S. Fertility Rate Hits Record Low for 2nd Straight Year; 40.7% of Babies Born to Unmarried Women

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

The fertility rate of women in the United States fell to a record low for the second year in a row in 2012, according to data released last week by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Also for the second year in a row, 40.7 percent of the babies born in the United States were born to unmarried mothers.

The fertility rate is the number of births per 1,000 women aged 15-44. In 2012–according to the Dec. 30, 2013 CDC report “Births: Final Data for 2012″–the U.S. fertility rate was 63.0. That was down from 63.2 in 2011, the previous all-time low.

“The 2012 general fertility rate (GFR) for the U.S. was 63.0 births per 1,000 women aged 15–44, down slightly (less than 1%) from the record low rate reported for the nation in 2011 (63.2),” said the CDC report.

The U.S. fertility rate has dropped from year-to-year for each of the last five years. In 2007, it was 69.3. In 2008, it was 68.1. In 2009, it was 66.2. In 2010, it was 64.1. In 2011, it was 63.2. And, in 2012, it was 63.0.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Escape Poverty: Graduate, Work, Get Married, Have Kids

Fifty years ago today, in his State of the Union Address, President Lyndon Johnson declared an “unconditional war on poverty in America.”

Over the next two years, he massively expanded the federal government, creating Medicaid, Medicare and the food stamp program, and increasing federal involvement in public education.

What impact did this have on poverty?

In the mid-1960s, as measured by the Census Bureau, the percentage of Americans living in poverty was on its way down, dropping from 22.4 percent in 1959 to 14.7 percent by 1966.

MARRIED WITH CHILDREN-CHART

Yet, since Johnson declared his war on poverty in 1964, the poverty rate has never dropped below 11.1 percent (the level it hit in 1973) and there has been only one three-year period when it persisted above 15 percent.

Read more from this story HERE.

The Decline in Male Fertility (+video)

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Photo Credit: 10 sec. RuleAre today’s young men less fertile than their fathers were? It’s a controversy in the fertility field, with some experts raising the alarm over what some are calling a “sperm crisis” because they believe men’s sperm counts have been decreasing for a decade or more.

Experts here for the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology annual conference last week debated the issue for an entire day.

One recent analysis found that in France, the sperm concentration of men decreased by nearly one-third between 1989 and 2005. Most but not all studies from several European nations with large databases and the ability to track health records have found that over the past 15 years or so, the counts of healthy men ages 18 to 25 have significantly decreased. This comes after a prominent study from the 1990s suggested that sperm count has decreased by half over the last half-century.

Read more from this story HERE.

Muslim nations’ fertility rates “have taken a steeper dive than any countries in history”

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Fertility rates of Muslim populations around the world have almost literally fallen off a cliff, so steep has been their decline. Policy makers at the UN and elsewhere have barely noticed this.

“There remains a widely perceived notion — still commonly held within intellectual, academic, and policy circles in the West and elsewhere — that ‘Muslim’ societies are especially resistant to embarking upon the path of demographic and familial change that has transformed population profiles in Europe, North America, and other ‘more developed’ areas,” write Nicholas Eberstadt and Apoorva Shah in the June 1 issue of Policy Review.

It is generally thought that Muslim fertility rates are growing by leaps and bounds. This has fed into the panic about growing Muslim influence, especially in Europe. While Eberstadt and Shah do not deal specifically with Muslims in Europe, they do point out that fertility rates have declined all over the Muslim world and that predominantly Muslim countries have taken a steeper dive than any countries in history.

Using data from the UN Population Division, which projects fertility rates for 190 countries, Eberstadt and Shah “appraise the magnitude of fertility declines in 48 of the world’s 49 identified Muslim-majority countries and territories.” The data show that “forty-eight Muslim-majority countries and territories witnessed fertility decline over the past three decades.”

When absolute fertility decline is examined, Eberstadt and Shah show “a drop of an estimated 2.6 births per woman between 1975 and 1980 and 2005 and 2010 — a markedly larger absolute decline than estimated for either the world as a whole (-1.3) or the less developed regions as a whole (-2.2) during those same years.” They point out that “Fully eighteen of these Muslim-majority places saw (total fertility rates) fall by three or more over those 30 years–with nine of them by four births per woman or more.”

Read more from this story HERE.