More babies were born in 2021 in the United States than in 2020, new government numbers suggest. That’s good news, but it doesn’t mean our long decline in birth rates is over. Instead, it signals that after cratering birthrates during the pandemic, we have returned to the long steady slide that began with the Great Recession.
The preliminary numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show a 1% increase in the number of babies born, but the nearly 3.7 million babies are well below 2019 and are in fact the second-lowest number on record. The 2021 figure doesn’t even amount to much of a “make-up” for the babies missing from 2020. It instead looks like a return to the old downward trend.
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As a country, we are half a baby per woman below the replacement rate.
The key (but provisional) numbers are these:
- 3,658,289 babies were born in the U.S. in 2021.
- The total fertility rate was 1.6635 babies per woman of childbearing age (2.1 is the replacement rate).
- 3,458,697 people died in the U.S. in 2021 (COVID-19 was the third leading cause), meaning our population’s “natural growth” was just under 200,000, or less than one-tenth of 1%.
The background is this: In 2007, 4.3 million babies were born in the U.S. This was just as the millennials (the largest generation in history) were entering their prime childbearing years, and so it seemed like we were at the beginning of a new baby boom. The recession hit in 2008, though, as did the iPhone, and birthrates plummeted for three years. The number of births flattened at about 4 million from 2010 to 2016, but this meant birthrates (babies per adult) were generally falling.
In 2016, we entered the third stage of our baby bust, and 2019 was easily the lowest year for births in decades, with only 3.75 million. That was down about 13% from 2007. The pandemic accelerated that, and 2020 saw the greatest drop yet in births — a 3.3% reduction.
We expected that 2020 drop to be an exception, and it was. People were totally isolated and alienated for the spring of 2020, being instructed to see other humans as vectors of disease. Nobody was in the mood to add more humans. November and December of 2020 saw a huge drop in births, bringing down the total for 2020.
The pandemic baby bust ended in June 2021, it appears — nine months after most children finally went back to school. Look at that little purple spike at the far right of the chart.
It’s possible that, in 2022, we will see a “makeup” for the babies foregone in late 2020 and early 2021 — that is, people who wanted three children will continue to have three children, just the third will come later than originally planned. But that makeup hasn’t shown up in the 2021 numbers. We have just about returned to the pre-pandemic trend.
Birthrates slightly climbed throughout 2021, suggesting that those pandemic non-babies might eventually materialize. On the other hand, the birthrate at the end of 2021 was far lower than it had been at the end of 2019.
What is the upshot, then, of these numbers? Elon Musk sizes it up decently. We are in the midst of a huge baby bust, and that’s a problem:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1529097667858546689?s=21&t=JOdPxfGkND0Wwmf8Y5GCQA
