The pace of babies born each year in the U.S. has slowed to a new record low, according to an analysis of 2023 birth certificate data published Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Last year’s slowdown marks an official end to the uptick in new babies that began during the COVID-19 pandemic. At least 3,591,328 babies were born in the U.S. in 2023, down 2% from the 3,667,758 born in 2022.
As the article points out, US has been below replacement birthrate(2.1 children per woman) since 1971. Immigration is the only reason the US has continued to have a growing population since that time.
1.6 is bad but many industrial countries have the same issue–only they don’t have strong immigration draw(or don’t allow it) to fall back on. East Asia (Japan, South Korea and now China), as well as southern European countries (Portugal, Spain, Italy) have had crushingly low birth rates for years.
Social programs, entitlements and politics are incredibly affected.
At the end of the day, people are being worked so much and are so stressed they can’t enjoy or don’t want to entertain bringing a new life into what for many countries is a vicious cycle of exploitation.
There was also a sharp decline since 2008, due to the financial crisis.
The obvious solution is to force American women to keep unwanted children against their will, rather than implementing streamlined immigration reform.
And step 2 is to shame them for having children if they can’t afford them.
The rest of that solution is to ban any kind of birth control a woman might choose on her own.
Then we have to make child care so unaffordable they will never see their child…
For my wife and I, our decision to not have kids came early in our marriage. We’ve never been super well off, but we get by. There have been times where we have had trouble paying rent. Neither one of us can imagine trying to just afford a child, much less raise one.