For the first time since the decade began, Americans are having fewer babies, and some experts are blaming the economy.
“It’s the recession,” said Andrew Hacker, a sociologist at Queens College of the City University of New York. “Children are the most expensive item in every family’s budget, especially given all the gear kids expect today. So it’s a good place to cut back when you’re uncertain about the future.”
In 2007, the number of births in the United States broke a 50-year-old record high, set during the baby boom. But last year, births began to decline nationwide, by nearly 2 percent, according to provisional figures released last week.
Those figures from the National Center for Health Statistics, indicate that births declined in all but 10 states in 2008 (most of them in a Northern belt where the recession was generally less severe) compared with the year before. Over all, 4,247,000 births were recorded in 2008, 68,000 fewer than the year before.
California logged 14,500 fewer births than in 2007, a 2.6 percent decline and the first since 2001, when the state struggled with job losses in Silicon Valley that led to layoffs in distribution, construction and other sectors.
Early figures for 2009 appear to confirm the correlation with the recession. As more families were feeling the effects of layoffs and economic uncertainty, births decreased even faster.
In Arizona, births declined about 3 percent in 2008, the first annual decrease since an economic downturn in 1991. In the first six months of 2009, 7 percent fewer babies were born compared with the year before. The state’s population bubble burst and the jobless rate rose from 5.5 percent to 8.7 percent in the 12 months ending in June.
In the first three months of 2009, births also declined 7 percent in Florida, another state where the economy took a tumble.
“It may be that many couples saw it coming,” said Carl Haub, senior demographer for the Population Reference Bureau.
Stephanie Coontz, a professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and research director for the Council on Contemporary Families, a research and advocacy group, said, “We probably can’t prove it yet, but I agree.”
“That’s what happened in the Great Depression,” Professor Coontz said, “and although in some periods since then, we have sometimes seen women decide to have a baby if they get laid off, that decision is usually only made if the husband is working and his job seems secure.
“More than 80 percent of the job losses in this recession have been borne by men,” Professor Coontz added. “There are a lot of families where a maternity leave would mean that no income at all was coming in.”
Historically, birth rates have fluctuated with the economy. Record lows were recorded during two economic crises: the Depression in the 1930s and the Arab oil embargo in the 1970s.
By the 1970s, birth rates were also affected by the rise of feminism and easier access to contraceptives and to abortion. But would they have dropped as low as they did, Mr. Haub asked, without “the added impetus of inflation, not to mention long lines at the gas station?”
“While that question can never be definitively answered,” he said, “we do know that the economic setting hardly seems conducive to starting families or having additional children. Double-digit inflation during the 1970s made two-earner, two-career families a virtual necessity for many.”
Stephanie J. Ventura, chief of the reproductive statistics branch of the National Center for Health Statistics, said, “We’ve had these bumps and drops in the past, but 2009 will be critical.”
Mr. Haub agreed. “If the economic crisis can be given a start date of early 2008,” he said, “then evidence of a slump in the birth rate might become apparent as early as late 2008, but could not be really conclusive until well into 2009.”
“It is certainly too soon to tell if this economic crisis will result in a sharp drop in the birth rate,” he said, “but all the measures and indicators, along with the collapse of the mainstays of the economy, are much worse than in the 1970s.”
In 2006 and 2007, the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, recorded a birth rate of 14.3 per thousand people. That number declined to 13.9 in 2008 (most sharply near the end of the year).
The fertility rate among women 15-to-44 years old, which rose from 68.7 per 1,000 in 2006 to 69.2 in 2007, dipped to 68.4 in 2008.