New data confirms a baby boom that some doctors hoped was really one “baby bust”. Health departments in more than two dozen states provided records to CBS News, showing a 7% drop in births in December, nine months after the first closures began.
Researchers say it continues to experience a much larger decline in fertility in recent decades.
The number of babies an average woman is expected to give in the United States has dropped from nearly four in the 1950s to less than two today.
The fall could present a totally different risk to society than what was first noticed decades ago, when an apocalyptic fear took over America in the 1960s and 1970s.
“The stakes of this battle are much greater than any we’ve ever fought,” Walter Cronkite told a 1970 CBS News broadcast. “The experts we interviewed told us that population was the underlying crisis. “.
When the world was stamped out to 10 billion people, many researchers back then predicted that overpopulation would ruin humanity.
Biologist Paul Ehrlich once described the threat as “The Population Bomb,” the title of a book he wrote in 1968.
“At some point in the next 15 years, the end will come, and in the end I mean a total breakdown of the planet’s ability to support humanity,” he said in a 1970 broadcast.
Today, however, there is a very different note from researchers like University of Southern California professor Dowell Myers, who studies demographic trends.
“The problem is we’ve outgrown it and left it too much,” said Myers, co-host of “CBS This Morning,” Tony Dokoupil.
While the world’s population continues to grow, a major study published in The Lancet in 2020 predicted it would peak in 2064 and fall by nearly a billion people by the end of the century, the reason is that there are fewer babies.
The United States is already below the so-called “replacement level” by some measures, which means there are fewer young people supporting the country’s aging population.
Myers said of the decline, “This is a crisis.”
“We need to have enough people of working age to bear the burden of these elderly people, who deserve their retirement, deserve all their rights and will live 30 more years,” he said. “No one in the history of the world has had so many old people to deal with.”
He Coronavirus pandemic it also makes the problem worse, despite what some people thought earlier.
“We thought, oh, we’d see a baby boom. But we just didn’t see it,” said Dr. David Jaspan, president of the Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics at Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia.
Jaspan said patients are not only concerned about their health but also about their finances.
“I get a report every morning at 5:15 on what has happened in the last 24 hours. And the first report I see is the number of deliveries in the last 24 hours,” Jaspan said. “It’s less than it used to be.”
The Brookings Institution has predicted “a large, durable baby bust” of at least 300,000 fewer children by 2021.
For Laura Lindberg, who tracks reproductive data from the Guttmacher Institute, declining births could be a sign of progress – a marker of women’s equality and freedom of choice.
“So it’s a shift to a later life. In that shift comes more education, more careers, more employment. So it’s a rearrangement of how people engage in age. adult, “Lindberg explained.
Dowell Myers disagrees, but is generally concerned that the declining birth rate is also a “barometer of despair.”
Myers said he never expected to talk about a decreased birth rate during his lifetime.
Asked about what changed, he noted “the burdens of life.”
“The cost of housing, the cost of education, all of these things have become increasingly difficult,” Dowell said. “I think the boomers themselves don’t realize what’s harder for today’s millennials. And they think, ‘Yeah, when we were young we had to live, you know, with very little money, and we got along, and you can do the same. That’s the story, right? Well no, it’s really a lot harder for young people today. It’s amazing that it’s so much harder. “