Baby Bust: U.S. Fertility Rates Hit All-time Lows

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The impact of the U.S. recession will reverberate for generations to come as women — both Anglos and Hispanics — continue to postpone having children.

For the second year in a row, deaths of non-Hispanic whites outnumbered births from July 1, 2012, to July 1, 2013, according to population estimates released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau.

“These are the only two years in U.S. history when more non-Hispanic whites died than were born,” said Kenneth Johnson, senior demographer at the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey Institute. Births have been fewer for some time, “but the decline since the onset of the Great Recession has been precipitous.”

The Census Bureau estimates that there were just under 2 million births to whites who are not Hispanic, compared with 2.3 million births at the peak of the economic boom in 2006–07 — a 13 percent drop in just six years.

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