The fertility rate in the United States has been trending down for decades, and a new report shows that another drop in births in 2023 brought the rate down to the lowest it’s been in more than a century.
There were about 3.6 million babies born in 2023, or 54.4 live births for every 1,000 females ages 15 to 44, according to provisional data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics.
After a steep plunge in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, the fertility rate has fluctuated. But the 3% drop between 2022 and 2023 brought the rate just below the previous low from 2020, which was 56 births for every 1,000 women of reproductive age.
- It is expensive AF to have a baby.
- It is expensive and difficult to find care for a baby while working full time or two or three jobs.
- Climate chaos is here.
- 10 mega corps run the US and believe we are all expendable.
- Our reproductive rights are being stripped.
Why anyone of us chooses to have a baby is becoming more difficult to understand.
I don’t know who this would be bad news for.
It’s bad news for the wealthy because it means they’ll have less labor to exploit
Unfortunately because the world runs on speculative investment, a smaller birthrate means less investment in child care, making it harder to find babysitters and daycares
Japan is already suffering from this, the birthrates are incredibly low but the daycares are packed because nobody is paying daycare workers enough, and nobody is investing enough to build new ones.
Good news for my kids. Less scarcity for them. This is what the world needs. Less kids. Everywhere.
You have it backwatds, there will not be the same quantity of stuff divided by fewer people. There will be less of everything to begin with.
You mean more older people to support for each worker, so higher taxes on workers
That’s just fearmongering. We have enough shit to help everyone already, and we are automating jobs at a very high rate, to the point that a lot of jobs are literal unneeded bullshit.
If anything, fewer workers always meant more worker power, better organizing, higher wages, etc. Look at what happened when the oligarchic idiots got a whole generation killed in WWI. Labour won big after, since labour was scarce, while capital was not.
People don’t want to bring babies into an unsafe world … who’d a thunk it?
I feel like this isn’t the right term to use for something like this.
When I hear fertility rate, I think, capability of having babies. How many people are infertile due to whatever reason, thus limiting our ability to have more children.
This should just be birth rate?
I’m always reminded of this article when I see news like this:
