Americans aren’t just waiting longer to have kids and having fewer once they start—they’re less likely to have any at all.
The shift means that childlessness may be emerging as the main driver of the country’s record-low birthrate.
Women without children, rather than those having fewer, are responsible for most of the decline in average births among 35- to 44-year-olds during their lifetimes so far, according to an analysis of the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey data by University of Texas demographer Dean Spears for The Wall Street Journal. Childlessness accounted for over two-thirds of the 6.5% drop in average births between 2012 to 2022.
While more people are becoming parents later in life, 80% of the babies born in 2022 were to women under 35, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Vital Statistics data.
“Some may still have children, but whether it’ll be enough to compensate for the delays that are driving down fertility overall seems unlikely,” says Karen Benjamin Guzzo, director of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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