People had fun during the lockdowns.
The U.S. saw 3,659,289 babies born in 2021. That’s a 1% increase from 2020 and the first rise since 2014.
I tried to access the provisional report but it’s password protected. From ABC News:
The report also showed the fertility rate — the number of live births per 1,000 women between the ages 15 and 44 — was 56.6. This is up from 56 in 2020 and the first increase since 2014, according to the CDC.However, the total fertility rate — the number of births a hypothetical group of 1,000 people would have over their lifetimes — was 1,663.5 births per 1,000 women.This is still below what experts refer to as replacement level, the level a population needs to replace itself, which is 2,100 births per 1,000 women.The team looked at birth rates among women aged 25 and older increased while decreasing for those aged 24 and younger.”That sort of suggests [that] when we saw the decline in births from 2019 to 2020, probably a lot of births were postponed,” Hamilton said. “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.”
Women aged 35 to 44 had the most births. This fits the trend that women want to wait to have children.
Teenage births declined by 6%:
Among teenagers aged 15 to 19, the rate of birth declined 6% from 15.4 per 1,000 to 14.4 per 1,000 — a record low for this age group.Teenage births have been continuously falling since 2007 by an average of about 7% through last year.”When you look at it across time, that’s a 77% decline since 1991 and 65% decline since 2017. That’s astonishing,” Hamilton said. “That’s certainly good news. And it will be interesting to see when we go into next year if it continues on.”Meanwhile, for tweens and teens aged 10 to 14, the rate of birth was 0.2 per 1,000, which is unchanged since 2015, the report found.
Unfortunately, 2021 had an increase in premature births went up as well from 10.09% to 10.48%. This is the highest since 2007:
Increases were seen in babies born early preterm, which is before 34 weeks gestation, and later preterm, which is 34 to 37 weeks gestation.Premature babies are at a greater risk for problems with feeding, breathing, vision and hearing, as well as behavioral issues.”Whenever you see an increase in preterm births, that’s concerning,” Joyce Martin, from the Division of Vital Statistics and co-author of the report, told ABC News. “And we saw an increase in early-term babies, and they’re at greater risk than later-term babies of not surviving the first year of life.”
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