US Population Conundrum: Will Next Generation Have Grandchildren?
Editor’s Note: Our readers responded strongly to this story when it originally ran; we’re reposting it here in case you missed it.
An oft-repeated adage warns that if churches aren’t crying, they’re dying.
It’s an admonition to church leaders to welcome babies and children if they want to survive.
If the same can be said about nations, America is headed for a defeating silence that will mark its demise.
According to CNN, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics recorded the lowest birth rate in the U.S. in a century last year.
After years of steady decline — and one precipitous drop-off in 2020 — there were just 54.4 live births per 1,000 women in the 15 to 44 age category in 2023.
In 2023, the general fertility rate was 54.4 births per 1,000 women ages 15–44, marking a 3% decrease from the previous year https://t.co/VuNiLOKLaD pic.twitter.com/BUWAhb9vME
— NCHS (@NCHStats) April 25, 2024
That’s down even from the record low of 56 births per 1,000 women reached at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic hysteria.
This marks a grim reality that the future for would-be parents and grandparents is one without the pitter-patter of little feet.
“We’ve certainly had larger declines in the past. But decline fits the general pattern,” said Dr. Brady Hamilton, the report’s co-author and a statistician for the National Center for Health Statistics.
Notably, the decline mostly came from the younger women who will populate the next generation.
Motherhood for women ages 15 to 19, in particular, has been on a steady decline but reached a record low of 13.2 births per 1,000 last year. That figure represents a 79 percent drop from the high reached in 1991.
“The highest rates have, over time, been shifting towards women in their 30s whereas before it used to be with women in their 20s,” Hamilton explained.
“One factor, of course, is the option to wait,” he said of the difference with older women.
“We had a pandemic, or there’s an economic downturn, let’s say — women in their 20s can postpone having a birth until things improve and they feel more comfortable,” Hamilton said. “For older women, the option of waiting is not as viable.”
The reasons for this change are myriad, but it may be that the U.S. and other developed nations are victims of their own success.
Populations where women are more educated, have more access to contraceptives and are wealthier typically see a decline in fertility, according to a Global Burden of Disease study recently published in the Lancet.
Developing countries in areas such as sub-Saharan Africa maintain a robust birth rate that outpaces Western nations, though others have a rate of 1.1 children per female, falling short of the 2.1 children per woman replacement rate.
The trend may take over the world by the end of this century, with bleak predictions that as many as 155 out of the 204 countries of the world could dip below the replacement rate by 2050 and that 97 percent of all nations will fall dangerously below by 2100.
At least for the United States, the availability of abortion on demand seems to be a factor in this equation as it negatively correlates to the birth rate, according to estimates from the Guttmacher Institute.
The reproductive research organization predicted that abortions in 2023 would “substantially exceed” the 930,000 committed in 2020, which tracks with the fall in live births over that period.
There is further evidence in the 2.3 percent increase in live births in states that restricted abortion following the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Of course, more babies coming into the world is a catastrophe for people like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who said in an April 24 post on X that Democrats “won’t allow our daughters and granddaughters to grow up with fewer rights than we had.”
The failed Democratic presidential candidate posted a graphic showing time zones with the year 1864 over Arizona after the state’s Supreme Court upheld a decades-old ban.
We won’t allow our daughters and granddaughters to grow up with fewer rights than we had. pic.twitter.com/nv6f8WTbFZ
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) April 24, 2024
Perhaps she could not see the irony that abortion doesn’t “allow our daughters and granddaughters to grow up” at all.
But many, like Clinton, still hold on to the since-debunked notion advanced by Paul D. Ehrlich that the world is overpopulated even as the problems of a shrinking population become apparent.
Places such as California have become a microcosm where the economic pitfalls of such a demographic shift can be studied in real time.
However, the most unfortunate detriment comes from the loss of family and of future generations that will never be born.
The burdens of aging are tempered by the blessing of living long enough to know our children’s children.
There’s nothing more transcendent than that — nothing that soothes the sufferings of old age like holding a newborn grandbaby.
If the next generation doesn’t reverse the trend toward a childless future — one largely devoid of the cries of new life — the future of our country and our species is grim.
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