The birth rate in the United States fell 4% in 2020 to about 3.6 million babies, its sixth consecutive annual decline and the lowest since 1979, according to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The United States had the smallest number of babies in more than four decades last year, reflecting declining European birth rates, with the COVID-19 pandemic forcing more people to care for sick family members or to deal with job losses.
The birth rate in the United States fell 4% in 2020 to about 3.6 million babies, its sixth consecutive annual decline and the lowest since 1979, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). United.
The CDC has not attributed the overall decline to the pandemic, but experts have predicted that the reasons for the pandemic, including anxiety, will affect the country’s birth rate.
“The recent decline in birth rates reflects both a long-term declining trend in birth rates that was apparent before the pandemic and a reduction linked to the pandemic,” said Lorna Thorpe, director of epidemiology at the NYU Langone Department of Population Health in New York City.
In general, fertility rates in the United States have fallen over the years, with women marrying late and delaying childbearing, especially in years when the economy has slowed.
Older data from the Population Reference Bureau, a nonprofit statistics collector, showed the birth rate in the United States reached a record level in 1936 following the stock market crash of 1929.
This once again suffered a heavy blow in the 1970s following major social changes, including the landmark Roe v Wade case which legalized abortion.
Many European countries have also seen a drop in births, and demographics experts predict a baby bust across the continent this year.
In Italy, nine months after the country’s first lockdown in Europe, births fell 22% in December. Blaming the decline in birth rates, big companies like Reckitt, Nestlé and Danone have seen lower sales of infant formula.
The CDC said the fertility rate in the United States, which measures the number of births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44, declined 4% in 2020.
This provisional data is based on 99.87 percent of all birth certificates registered and processed last year by the National Center for Health Statistics as of February 11.
