The U.S. birth rate held steady in 2022 without returning to pre-pandemic levels, as women are having babies at an older age, a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report revealed Thursday.
Record low birth rates were seen when it comes to moms in their teens and early 20s, with the birth rates among women age 40 and older continue to rise, according to the new CDC analysis of more than 99% of birth certificates issued last year.
Births to moms 35 and older also continued to rise last year, with the highest rates in that age group since the 1960s, the CDC found.
A little under 3.7 million babies were born in the U.S. last year, about 3,000 fewer than the year before. Because the numbers are provisional, and the change was small, officials consider births to have been "kind of level from the previous year," the CDC’s Brady Hamilton, the lead author of the report, said.
U.S. births were declining for more than a decade before COVID-19 hit, then dropped a whopping 4% from 2019 to 2020. They ticked up about 1% in 2021, an increase experts attributed to pregnancies that couples had attempted to delay amid the early days of the pandemic.
The CDC analysis released Thursday found that the highest birth rates continue to be seen in women in their early 30s. The number of births for women that age was basically unchanged from the year before. Births were down slightly for women in their late 20s, who have the second-highest birth rate.
Births to Hispanic moms rose 6% last year and surpassed 25% of the U.S. total, according to the report.
Births to White moms fell 3%, but still accounted for 50% of births. Births to Black moms fell 1%, and were 14% of the total.
The U.S. was once among only a few developed countries with a fertility rate that ensured each generation had enough children to replace itself – about 2.1 kids per woman. However, it has been sliding, and in 2020 dropped to about 1.6, the lowest rate on record. It rose slightly in 2021, to nearly 1.7, and stayed there last year.
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"Immigrants have been propping up our population rates for a long time," Karen Guzzo, director of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, told NBC.
"This is not a story about women being too career-driven. This is a story about what happens when young people try to transition in society and whether or not they have the resources to build another generation of people," she added.
The CDC found that birth rates in women ages 35 to 39 increased 2% in 2022.
Nearly continuous increases in birth rates have been seen for women ages 40 to 44 since 1985, NBC News reported. Last year, the birth rate rose by 4% for that age range. In 2022, the birth rate in women ages 45 and older soared by 12%, but the overall number of babies born to mothers in that age range is low.
"The biggest thing is the age structure of the U.S. population is changing. The age structure is very different now compared with a decade or two decades ago. The number of women who are at reproductive age is shrinking," Feinian Chen, a professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University, also told NBC.
Births to teens are down nearly 80% compared to levels in the early 1990s, something experts attribute to contraception and more comprehensive sex education in schools. The number of babies born to teen moms – which tend to be from unplanned pregnancies -- has declined steadily by about 8% per year since 2007.
Last year, the U.S. teen birth rate dropped 3% -- a smaller decrease than seen in 2021.
More complete and detailed 2022 numbers are expected later this year. That data should offer a better understanding of what happened in individual states, and among different racial and ethnic groups, Hamilton said.
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It also may show whether births were affected by the U.S. Supreme Court decision last June overturning Roe v. Wade, which allowed states to ban or restrict abortion.
If such restrictions are having an impact on births, it did not show up in the national data released Thursday, according to The Associated Press.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
