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.
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?
Good call-out. Further down the article they start using the term birth rate. Just another corporate-owned cable news network going for clickbaity headlines instead of reporting information.