A Newly Published Survey Shows that Only Half of US Women Under 45 Have Children
I am not anti-marriage or anti-Nuclear Family, but I also don’t support conservatives who marginalize or shame adult singles for being single (and/or for being childless) and who slavishly focus on things like the marriage or birth rate declining.
All my fellow conservatives will do when or if they see reports like the one below (about half of women not having children) is to write more propaganda pieces shaming women for being childless, when they should accept the situation for what it is and start asking themselves how can they, or society, support childless adult women better?
No amount of conservative shaming will cause women to suddenly run out and start having children.
As to the women who’d like to marry prior to having children – they don’t believe in or want to have children out of wedlock – conservatives have no solutions, including Christian ones.
Christians scream and yell at single Christian women to marry, but there are no single men for Christian women to marry, unless they are willing to marry Non-Christian men, and the Christians who cling to the “equally yoked” rule won’t tolerate that.
All these conservatives – Christians and otherwise – won’t lift a finger to actually help a single women who’d like to marry (and possibly have children) to marry.
If you’re a conservative who complains about single women being single (and/or childless), and yet, you’re not lifting a finger to actually help marriage-desiring single women to marry, you are part of the problem and have not earned a right to opine on these issues. So keep your nuclear-family- and pro-natalism- worshipping pie hole shut.
All those types of conservatives do is shame women for being single (and childless) and complain about women being single and childless…. shaming women for being single or childless won’t help women get married and / or have children, and complaining about a problem will not solve a problem.
Writing editorials extolling the supposed wonders of motherhood will not actually bring a husband into a woman’s life.
Help the single women get married first, then those women can have children (if they choose to have children).
Shaming, guilt tripping, pressuring, or lecturing women into marrying and/or having children does not work, and it may end up in some women making some very long lasting harmful decisions – and those pushing these women into marriage and motherhood won’t be there to pick up the pieces.
(Link): US births continue to decline as nearly half of women under 45 are childless: study
January 12, 2023
The number of births in the US has continued to decline — repeating a decades-long trend — as nearly half of American women under 45 are childless, according to a new study.
(Link): The modern family size is changing. Four charts show how.
Delayed parenthood and fewer kids: An analysis of new fertility data shows how the modern U.S. family has evolved over time.
January 12, 2023
By Aria Bendix and Joe Murphy
Families are smaller and people are waiting longer to have children than in years past, according to an NBC News analysis of data released this week by the National Center for Health Statistics.
The overall fertility rate in the U.S. declined from 2015 to 2020, additional NCHS data shows, reaching a low of fewer than 6 births per 100 women ages 15 to 44. (The rate then rose 1% from 2020 to 2021, though the overall trend still faces downward.)
The U.S. birth rate — the number of births per 1,000 women — declined from 2018 to 2019 among women in their 20s and early 30s but increased among women ages 35 to 44, the report showed.
Sociologists pointed to a few factors that may explain these trends. One is that contraception has become more reliable, while another is that people are getting married later in life, and most births in the U.S. still happen within marriage.
“People are waiting to have kids until they feel ready, they’ve got a good job, they feel mature enough to devote themselves to parenting, they feel like they’re going to have a good partner,” said Karen Benjamin Guzzo, director of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Another possible — though less influential — factor is medically assisted reproduction techniques, such as in vitro fertilization, which are helping some people have kids at older ages (primarily those with high incomes or coverage of the service as a benefit through their employer).
On average, people in the U.S. are also choosing to have fewer children, according to the NCHS report: In 2018, the average woman had around one biological child, compared to more than three in 1960.
(Link): Only half of US women under 45 have children: CDC survey
by H. Nightingale
Jan 12, 2023
A newly published survey from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Survey of Family Growth has revealed a decline in the number of children Americans are having, as well as the increasing age at which American women have their first child.
The survey, published on Tuesday, covers the years 2015 through 2019, and found that in this time frame 52.1 percent of women between the ages of 15-44 had at least one biological child, while between 2011 and 2015, this number was 54.9 percent.
For men, between 2015 and 2019 39.7 percent had at least one biological child, while this number was 43.8 percent between 2011 and 2015.
It was also revealed that the birth rate in the US to be 1.1 children for women under the age of 45, down from 1.3 in 2002. For men, this number has dropped to 0.8 children.
The age at which women under the age of 45 have their first child has increased, from 23.1 between 2011 and 2015 up to 23.7 between 2015 to 2019. In 2002, this age was 22.9.
For men, the age at which they have their first child has increased from 25.5 between 2011 and 2015, to 26.4 between 2015 and 2019. In 2002, this age was 25.1.
The survey notes reliable contraception, the pursuit of higher education, increased labor force participation by females, changes in familial values, instability in relationships, and financial concerns as reasons for the increasing age at which childbearing is delayed.
The survey also found that education level can have an effect on the age at which a woman has their first child.
For those who have no high school diploma or equivalent, 57.5 percent of women had their first child under the age of 20. For women who have a bachelor’s degree or higher, 42.9 percent had their first child between the ages of 30 and 49.
…According to the Daily Mail, some states saw a sharper drop in birth rates than others.
In Arizona, for example, the number of births per 1,000 women under the age of 45 fell from 80.6 in 2005 to 54 in 2020. In Utah, this number fell from 92.8 births to 64.1.
January 11, 2023
Just over half of women under 45 are having babies in the US, according to official data that lays bare the country’s fertility drought.
From 2002 to 2019, the share of women aged 15-45 with at least one child dropped from 59.9 percent to 52.1 percent, a fall of an eighth.
The figure dropped from 46.7 percent to 39.7 percent among men in the same time, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) national survey.
…The rising age of women in the US and falling birthrates have been attributed to women leaving it until later in life to have children to pursue careers, changes in familial values as well as advances in IVF and other fertility treatments.
The CDC also highlighted the rising costs of becoming a parent – with estimates suggesting it now costs more than $300,000 to raise a child to age 18 compared to around $220,000 20 years ago.
Women are having their first child when they are 0.8 years older now than they were in 2002 – with the average age having moved from 22.9 to 23.7 years old.
Men have always had their first child at an older age than women, but they have experienced a similar increase in age when first becoming a parent – from 25.1 to 26.4 years old.
These figures do not account for the Covid pandemic, which likely drove the average age higher as teenage pregnancies fell alongside a general drop in fertility.
Related:
(Link): It’s A Woman’s Choice: Falling Fertility Rates Are Not the Business of Government by G. Hinsliff
(Link): 2014 Study: US Birth Rates Hit Record Low (but on increase for women age 35 and especially over 40)
(Link): A Woman’s Fertility is Her Own Business, not Everyone Else’s by L. Bates
(Link): Women Are Having Fewer Babies Because They Have More Choices by Jill Filipovic
(Link): The Best Age To Marry Is When You Meet The Right Person
(Link): The Nauseating Push by Evangelicals for Early Marriage
(Link): Men Who Have Children Younger Die By Mid-Life -early marriage also involved, says researchers
(Link): A Case Against Early Marriage by Ashley Moore (editorial)
(Link): Woman, 47, Gives Birth to Her First Child an Hour After Learning She Was Pregnant
(Link): Woman in Her 70s May Be Oldest Ever to Give Birth
(Link): Sorry, but being a mother is not the most important job in the world by Catherine Deveny
(Link): Stop Pressuring Women to Be Moms: It’s Insulting to Assume We All Want The Same Thing by R K Bussel
(Link): Women are having fewer kids, and demographers don’t know why
(Link): Check your ‘cat-lady’ preconceptions about childless women
(Link): Infertility/ Kids/ The Male Biological Clock
(Link): Loving the child-free people in your church by S. Burden
(Link): Learning to See Your Single Neighbor by H. Stallcup
(Link): Single Adult Christian Pressured Into Marriage by Her Church – And Regrets It
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