US birth rate dips again

MIKE STOBBE

AP Med­ical Writer

ATLANTA — The econ­omy may well be the best form of birth control.

U.S. births dropped for the third straight year — espe­cially for young moth­ers — and experts think money wor­ries are the reason.

A fed­eral report released Thurs­day showed declines in the birth rate for all races and most age groups. Teens and women in their early 20s had the most dra­matic dip, to the low­est rates since record-keeping began in the 1940s. Also, the rate of cesarean sec­tions stopped going up for the first time since 1996.

Experts sus­pected the econ­omy drove down birth rates in 2008 and 2009 as women put off hav­ing chil­dren. With the 2010 fig­ures, sus­pi­cion has turned into certainty.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt now that it was the reces­sion. It could not be any­thing else,” said Carl Haub, a demog­ra­pher with the Pop­u­la­tion Ref­er­ence Bureau, a Wash­ing­ton, D.C.-based research orga­ni­za­tion. He was not involved in the new report.

U.S. births hit an all-time high in 2007, at more than 4.3 mil­lion. Over the next two years, the num­ber dropped to about 4.2 mil­lion and then about 4.1 million.

Last year, it was down to just over 4 mil­lion, accord­ing to the new report from the Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol and Prevention.

For teens, birth rates dropped 9 per­cent from 2009. For women in their early 20s, they fell 6 per­cent. For unmar­ried moth­ers, the drop was 4 percent.

Experts believe the down­ward trend is tied to the econ­omy, which offi­cially was in a reces­sion from Decem­ber 2007 until June 2009 and remains weak. The the­ory is that women with money wor­ries — espe­cially younger women — feel they can’t afford to start a fam­ily or add to it.

That’s true of Mary Gar­rick, 27, an adver­tis­ing exec­u­tive in Colum­bus, Ohio. She and her hus­band, David, mar­ried in 2008 and hoped to start hav­ing chil­dren quickly, in part because men in his fam­ily have died in their 40s. But David, 33, was laid off that year from his nurs­ing job and again last year.

He’s work­ing again, but wor­ries about the econ­omy linger. “It kind of made us cau­tious about life deci­sions, like hav­ing a fam­ily. It’s def­i­nitely some­thing that affected us,” she said.

Kristi Els­berry, a mar­ried 27-year-old mother of two, had her tubes tied in 2009 after she had trou­ble find­ing a job and she and her hus­band grew wor­ried about the finan­cial bur­den of any addi­tional chil­dren. “Kids are so expen­sive, espe­cially in this day and age. And nei­ther of us think anything’s going to get bet­ter,” said Els­berry, of Leland, N.C.

Many of the report’s find­ings are part of a trend and not sur­pris­ing. There was a con­tin­ued decline in the per­cent­age of pre­ma­ture births at less than 37 weeks. And — as in years past — birth rates fell in younger women but rose a lit­tle in women 40 and older, who face a clos­ing bio­log­i­cal win­dow for hav­ing chil­dren and may be more wor­ried about that than the economy.

But a few of the find­ings did star­tle experts.

One involved a sta­tis­tic called the total fer­til­ity rate. In essence, it tells how many chil­dren a woman can be expected to have if cur­rent birth rates con­tinue. That fig­ure was 1.9 chil­dren last year. In most years, it’s more like 2.1.

More strik­ing was the change in the fer­til­ity rate for His­panic women. The rate plum­meted to 2.4 from nearly 3 chil­dren just a few years ago.

“Whoa!” said Haub, in reac­tion to the statistic.

The econ­omy is no doubt affect­ing His­panic moth­ers, too, but some young women who immi­grated to the United States for jobs or other oppor­tu­ni­ties may have left, Haub said.

Another shocker: the C-section rate. It rose steadily from nearly 21 per­cent in 1996 to 32.9 per­cent in 2009, but dropped slightly to 32.8 last year.

Cesarean deliv­er­ies are some­times med­ically nec­es­sary. But health offi­cials have wor­ried that many C-sections are done out of con­ve­nience or unwar­ranted cau­tion, and in the 1980s set a goal of keep­ing the national rate at 15 percent.

It’s too soon to say the trend has reversed, said Joyce Mar­tin, a CDC epi­demi­ol­o­gist who co-authored the new report.

But the increase had slowed a bit in recent years, and assum­ing the decline was in elec­tive C-sections, that’s good news, some experts said.

“It is quite grat­i­fy­ing,” said Carol Hogue, an Emory Uni­ver­sity pro­fes­sor of mater­nal and child health and epidemiology.

“There are strong winds push­ing against C-sections,” she said, includ­ing new poli­cies and edu­ca­tion ini­tia­tives that dis­cour­age elec­tive C-sections in moth­ers who have not reached full-term.

Hogue agreed that the econ­omy seems to be the main rea­son for the birth declines. But she noted that it’s pos­si­ble that hav­ing fewer chil­dren is now more accepted and expected.

“Hav­ing one child may be becom­ing more ‘nor­mal,’” she said.

Posted by AP News on Nov 17 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.