The number of births in the United States increased in 2021 for the first time since 2014, according to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Over 3.7 million babies were born in 2021, an increase of about 1% from 2020. The slight increase marks a rebound after births fell 4% in 2020, the largest one-year drop in about 50 years.
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The CDC’s National Vital Statistics System compiled the data using collected birth records received and processed by the National Center for Health Statistics for 2021 as of early February 2022.
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Births increased for women above age 25, most markedly in women 35-39, who saw an increase of 5% from 2020. But women under 25 saw an overall 2% decrease in births from 2020, a record low for this age group.
Premature births also jumped 4% in 2021 to nearly 10.5%, the highest rate reported since 2007. The CDC did not put forward a reason for the increase in preterm births, but older pregnant women are more likely than their younger counterparts to give birth at less than 37 weeks gestation. COVID-19 infection, however mild, has also been linked to a higher risk of preterm birth.
Birthrates had been on the decline even before the pandemic began over two years ago, but it is believed that COVID-19 exacerbated the downward trend. Poor national economic health has proven influential in people’s decisions to have children in the past. For instance, birthrates plummeted across age groups during the recession that began in late 2007.
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic likely had a similar effect on family planning. Birthrate data going back to late 2020 suggests that women delayed pregnancy out of concern for the public health emergency. In December 2020, the month when babies conceived at the beginning of the pandemic would have been born, the birthrate had declined 8% from the previous year.
“That sort of suggests [that] when we saw the decline in births from 2019 to 2020, probably a lot of births were postponed,” Dr. Brady Hamilton, who is the lead author of the report and works with the NCHS Division of Vital Statistics, told ABC News. “People were waiting to see what happened [with the pandemic] and rates rose in older women as they may have proceeded to have that child.”
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The U.S. is not the only country recording decreased birthrates. France, Italy, Japan, and Belgium, for example, have reported drops in births about nine months after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic compared with the previous year.
