(The Hill) — Births in the United States dropped again between 2022 and 2023, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The national birth rate has been steadily declining for the last 17 years, with a particularly steep drop in births between 2007 and 2009 during the Great Recession.
Between 2007 and 2022, the U.S. birth rate fell by nearly 23%, according to CDC data.
There were 3,596,017 registered births in 2023, about 2 percent fewer than in 2022, when there were 3,667,758 registered births, according to CDC data.
The general fertility rate fell by nearly 3% last year to 54.5 births per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44.
That’s down from the 2022 rate of 56 births per 1,000 women, CDC data shows.
Teen births have declined almost every year since the 1990s and are continuing to fall.
The teenage birth rate dropped by 4% between 2022 and 2023, from 13.6 to 13.1 births per 1,000 girls aged 15 to 19, according to the CDC.
And the birth rate for teens between the ages of 15 and 17, specifically, declined by 2% from 5.6 to 5.5 births per 1,000 girls.
In 2007, the general fertility rate reached a height not seen since the 1990s at 69.5 births per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44, 1 percentage point higher than the year before, according to CDC data.
Since then, the birth rate has tumbled downward, in part due to the high cost of having children and concerns about future economic stability, according to Sarah Hayford, director of the Institute for Population Research at Ohio State University.
Hayford added the decline could be linked to cultural changes around family that are happening in the country.
“Not having children, or having fewer children, is becoming more socially acceptable,” Hayford told The Hill. “As a result, people are weighing more carefully the decision to have children.”
In her opinion, the declining birthrate is not necessarily a cause for concern. Changing family structures and changing population demographics “raise policy issues,” she said, but those issues aren’t inherently more difficult to find solutions to than others.
“If people want to have children but are not able to because of economic constraints, to me that would be a cause for concern,” Hayford said.