New data confirms a baby boom that, according to some doctors, is actually a “baby bust.” Health departments in more than two dozen states have provided records to CBS News showing a 7% drop in births in December – nine months after the first closure period began.
Researchers believe that this has led to a much larger decline in fertility in recent decades.
The number of babies the average woman will give birth to in the United States is expected to have dropped from nearly four in the 1950s to less than two today.
The decline could pose a very different risk to society than one first warned decades ago – when an apocalyptic fear gripped America in the 1960s and 1970s.
“The interests in this fight are far greater than any other we have ever fought,” Walter Cronkite said in a 1970 CBS News broadcast. “The experts we interviewed said the population is the fundamental crisis.”
While the world stampeded up to ten billion people, many researchers at the time predicted that overpopulation would destroy humanity.
Biologist Paul Ehrlich once declared the threat “The Population Bomb”, the title of a book he wrote in 1968.
“Sometimes in the next 15 years the end will come – and by the end I mean a total exposition of the planet’s ability to support humanity,” he said in a 1970 broadcast.
Today, however, a very different note is struck by researchers such as Professor Dowell Myers, University of Southern California, who studies demographic trends.
“The problem is that we let it overwhelm us too much,” Myers told Tony Dokoupil co-host Tony Dokoupil This Morning.
While the world population continues to grow, a major study published in The Lancet in 2020 predicted that it would peak in 2064 and decline by nearly a billion people by the end of the century – the reason being that there would be fewer babies.
The US is already below the so-called ‘replacement level’ by some measures, which means that fewer young people are promoting the country that is otherwise enlarging.
Myers said it was a crisis. ‘
“We need to have enough working-age people to bear the burden of these elderly people, who deserve their pension, they deserve all their rights and they are going to live out another 30 years,” he said. “No one in the history of the world has had so many older people to deal with.”
The coronavirus pandemic exacerbates the problem too – despite what some people have previously thought.
“We thought, oh, we would see a baby boom. But we just have not seen it yet,” says Dr. David Jaspan, chair of the Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics at Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia.
Jaspan said patients are not only worried about their health but also about their finances.
“I get a report every morning at 5:15 about what 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, lasting baby bust of at least 300,000 children by 2021.
For Laura Lindberg, who tracks reproductive data for the Guttmacher Institute, the decline in births could be a sign of progress – an indication of women’s equality and freedom of choice.
“So it’s a shift to later in life. In the shift comes more training, more careers, more jobs. So it’s a rearrangement of how people engage in adulthood,” Lindberg explained.
Dowell Myers does not agree with this, but in the bigger picture he is concerned that the declining birth rate is also a ‘barometer of despair’.
Myers said he never expected to talk about a worldwide declining birth rate during his lifetime.
To the question that has changed, he points to ‘the burdens of life’.
“The cost of housing, the cost of education, all of this has become increasingly difficult,” Dowell said. “I think the boomers themselves do not realize how much harder it is today for millennials. And they think, ‘Oh yes, when we were young, we had to live with very little money, and we finished, and you can do the same.’ “That’s the story, is it? Well, no, it’s really much harder for young people today. It’s amazing how hard it is.”