No Country for New Babies
May 5, 2021
For much of the past year, couples across the United States had little to do but each other. Lockdown orders forced many Americans into almost constant contact with their significant others, while forbidding a hefty percentage of our society’s non-carnal forms of entertainment. If this led to a surge in gross domestic lovemaking, it did not translate into more birth certificates.
In 2020, America’s birth rate declined at its fastest pace in 50 years, the federal government revealed Wednesday. That historic drop came on top of five preceding annual declines, leaving the nation’s birth rate at its lowest point in over a century. In 2020, there were 46 births for every 1,000 women in the United States; in the early 1960s, that figure was closer to 90. At the same time, the pandemic depressed immigration inflows and drastically increased annual deaths. As a result, America’s population over the past decade grew at the second-slowest rate on record.
