U.S. births fell last year, resuming a long national slide.
A little under 3.6 million babies were born in 2023, according to provisional statistics released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s about 76,000 fewer than the year before and the lowest one-year tally since 1979.
U.S. births were slipping for more than a decade before COVID-19 hit, then dropped 4% from 2019 to 2020. They ticked up for two straight years after that, an increase experts attributed, in part, to pregnancies that couples had put off amid the pandemic’s early days.
But “the 2023 numbers seem to indicate that bump is over and we’re back to the trends we were in before,” said Nicholas Mark, a University of Wisconsin researcher who studies how social policy and other factors influence health and fertility.
Who can afford to have a baby? Everything needed to care for one like formula, diapers, and clothing has shot up in price.
Not to mention, every so often one or more big brand formulas or baby food gets recalled due to lead contamination or something and who knows how long you’ve been feeding it to your child before the recall is announced.
There’s micro-plastics in mothers’ breast milk too. The babies can’t win.
Oh, and you want raise your family in a home of your own? Not likely. Even small rundown houses that need to basically be taken down to the studs and redone cost a king’s ransom.
If you find one hopefully you don’t get outbid by the venture capital backed companies offering over asking price. Maybe if you’re lucky, later on you can rent that same house from them for a monthly fee twice of what the mortgage payment would be.
Better hope your pregnancy goes flawlessly otherwise these anti-abortion laws might make you a felon.
But but the economy needs infinite growth!! How will we sustain growth without constantly feeding people into the machine?? /s
We live in a high CoL area, and in our experience the only financial line items from having a kid that matter are housing and childcare: we pay more on daycare than we did on rent before kid when we lived in a studio. Baby food is only used for a little while, and if you prefer, most of it is easy to make yourself.
And private daycare (or nanny) should be expensive, because caregivers should be making a living wage.
The only options I see to bring down costs are to exploit caregivers more than they already are (this is very wrong), to rely on grandparents for childcare, or to implement publicly funded daycare across the board.
Increase wages to make being a stay at home parent financially feasible.