America’s media used to tell a story about the baby bust, that it wasn’t really a baby bust, but a reshaping of the American family in the image of the highly educated urban liberal. The latest data undermine that story.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is, for some reason, the official baby counter in the United States — maybe part of our problem is that we consider pregnancy to be a disease. On March 18, the CDC finalized its count of babies born in the U.S. in 2023: 3,596,017.
That number is way down from the 3.67 million babies born in 2022. In 2007, before the iPhone came out and before the Great Recession, Americans had 4.32 million babies.
Our 3.596 million babies are the fewest since 1979, when we had a lot fewer possible parents. It goes without saying that our birth rate, 1.6 babies per woman, is the lowest ever.
When the baby bust was still young, some commentators and social scientists tried to claim it wasn’t real. It was, they claimed, largely a statistical artifact that actually told a happy story.
You see, Americans were still getting married and having babies, but they were just doing it in a smarter way: finishing college, doing graduate school, and then launching into egalitarian, heavily educated “supermarriages.” Women were having fewer babies in their 20s but more in their late 30s.
Everyone was more mature, and everything about coupling and parenting was more planned than in those haphazard earlier generations before long-acting reversible contraception and before everyone had a master’s degree. It may look on paper like birth rates were falling year after year, but in the end, American women were still going to have babies — they were just doing it the smart way.
This happy planning story struck a lot of chords in the liberal media, seeing how it flattered the lifestyles of the media class. But the story started falling apart last decade, and the latest numbers further undermine it.
Women in their 20s, to be sure, have had fewer babies nearly every single year since 2007. Women in their 30s, meanwhile, stopped having more babies before the pandemic. Births to women aged 30-34 effectively stopped increasing in 2016, and 2023 resulted in a decrease from the previous two years. Women in their late 30s also had fewer babies in 2023 than in 2022.
The bottom line is that a culture that has shifted marriage and childbearing later is a culture that has less marriage and fewer babies.