Birth Rate & Fertility

This links to a Fact Tank posting about factors linked to the decline in U.S. teen births. Among them are the economy and changes in sexual behavior.

Research over hundreds of years has consistently found that boys naturally outnumber girls at birth. The speculation is that this is nature’s way of countering the relatively high mortality rates of males, and creating more of a gender balance in the population. While historically, there have been about 105 boys born for every 100 girls […]

The release of 2012 statistics on the U.S. birth rates indicates a flattening of the sharp decline in fertility that accompanied the Great Recession.

This posting is an excerpt from a FactTank article about unmarried fatherhood, and which fathers are more likely to acknowledge paternity when asked. Unmarried fathers of sons are slightly more likely to acknowledge paternity than fathers of daughters.

This links to a FactTank posting about a new Statistics Canada report showing that birth rates for the first time are higher for women in their late 30s than in their early 20s. Most births in Canada are to women ages 30 and older; by contrast, in the U.S., 40% are.

In the U.S. and many other nations, it’s no longer unusual for women to have a first child at age 35 or even 40. In Canada, this rise in births to older mothers has produced a striking turnabout: For the first time on record, birth rates are higher for women in their late 30s than in their early 20s.

This is an excerpt from a FactTank posting about new data from the National Center for Health Statistics about birth rates in 2011. Rates for younger women fell to record lows, but rates continued to rise for women ages 40 and older.

The overall U.S. birth rate declined to an all-time low in 2011. Birth rates reached an all-time low among women in their teens and early 20s, while rising to the highest level in four decades among women in their early 40s.