Americans are forgoing one of the most precious gifts that a family can receive: children.
Reuters reports the birth rate has been falling steadily for decades in the United States, and, in 2020, it reached a 42-year low.
Many linked anxieties and financial troubles from the COVID-19 pandemic to the drop, though the Centers for Disease Control did not mention this as a possible factor in its new report.
According to the CDC National Center for Health Statistics, the birth rate fell 4 percent in 2020 in the U.S. – the lowest rate since 1979. The birth rate is calculated by the number of births per 1,000 women of childbearing age.
Approximately 3.6 million babies were born in 2020, the CDC found.
Another sign of the decline, companies that sell baby formula and other baby products, including Reckitt, Nestle and Danone, saw a drop in sales last year, Reuters noted.
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Here’s more from the report:
The CDC did not attribute the overall decline to the pandemic, but experts have predicted that pandemic-led reasons including anxiety will hit the country’s birth rate.
In general, US fertility rates have continued to fall over the years as women marry late and delay motherhood especially in years when the economy has slowed.
The report did not mention abortion, though it could be another reason for the declining birth rate.
A recent study by Japanese health ministry researchers suggests the pandemic may have led to an increase in abortions in 2020. They found that about 8 percent of the women who had abortions in Japan between October and November 2020 did so because of the pandemic.
The Planned Parenthood abortion chain also reported record high abortion numbers in its annual report, which includes the second half of 2019 and the first half of 2020. In the U.S., it performed 354,871 abortions.
Fears and financial troubles, exacerbated by the pandemic last year, often are reasons that mothers give when they abort their unborn babies.
According to the “Turnaway Study,” a project of the pro-abortion Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco, 40 percent of women seeking abortions mentioned financial reasons.
However, the study and others also have found that women often mention multiple reasons for an abortion, including relationship problems, future goals, other children and even just “bad timing.”
“Women have cited ‘social reasons,’ not mother’s health or rape/incest, as their motivation in approximately 93% of all abortions,” according to National Right to Life.
Pro-lifers work hard to make sure women never have to feel that they need an abortion because they are financially unstable. Thousand of pregnancy resource centers, maternity homes, adoption agencies and other charities provide material and financial support to help families in need.
