New data is confirming a baby boom that some doctors hoped was actually a “baby bust.” Health departments in more than two dozen states provided records to CBS News, showing a 7% drop in births in December – nine months after the first blockages began.
The researchers say a much larger drop in fertility has continued in recent decades.
The number of babies an average woman in the United States expects to have dropped from almost four in the 1950s to less than two today.
The fall could pose an entirely different risk to society than it was first warned decades ago – when apocalyptic fear came over the United States in the 1960s and 1970s.
“What is at stake in this battle is much greater than any that we have ever fought,” said Walter Cronkite in a CBS News broadcast in 1970. “The experts we interviewed told us that the population was the fundamental crisis.”
While the world ran to 10 billion people, many researchers at the time predicted that overpopulation would ruin humanity.
Biologist Paul Ehrlich once explained the threat as “The population bomb”, the title of a book of his own in 1968.
“Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come – and in the end, I mean a total collapse of the planet’s ability to sustain humanity,” he said in a 1970 broadcast.
Today, however, a very different note is being reached by researchers such as Professor Dowell Myers of the University of Southern California, who studies demographic trends.
“The problem is that we’ve crossed the threshold and dropped too much now,” Myers told “CBS This Morning” co-host Tony Dokoupil.
While the global population is still growing, a large study published in The Lancet in 2020 predicted that it would peak in 2064 and then drop to almost a billion people by the end of the century – the reason is, fewer babies.
The United States is already below the so-called “level of substitution” by some measures, which means fewer young people to support the country’s otherwise aging population.
Myers said of the decline: “This is a crisis.”
“We need to have people of working age enough to carry the burden of these elderly people, who deserve their retirement, deserve all their rights and will live another 30 years,” he said. “Nobody in the history of the globe has had so many elderly people to deal with.”
THE coronavirus pandemic it is also making the problem worse – despite what some people previously thought.
“We thought, oh, we would see a baby boom. But we just didn’t,” said Dr. David Jaspan, head of the Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics at Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia.
Jaspan said patients are not only concerned with their health, but also with their finances.
“I get a report every morning at 5:15 am about what has happened in the last 24 hours. And the first report I see is the number of deliveries in the last 24 hours,” said Jaspan. “It’s less than it used to be.”
The Brookings Institution predicted “a large, long-lasting baby bust” of at least 300,000 fewer children in 2021.
For Laura Lindberg, who monitors reproductive data for the Guttmacher Institute, the decrease in births can be a sign of progress – a marker of women’s equality and freedom of choice.
“So, it’s a change to adult life. In this change comes more education, more career, more employment. So it’s a reorganization of how people get involved in adulthood, ”explained Lindberg.
Dowell Myers does not disagree – but in general, he worries that the declining birth rate is also a “barometer of despair”.
Myers said he never expected to talk about a global decline in the birth rate during his lifetime.
Asked what has changed, he pointed out “the burdens of life”.
“The cost of housing, the cost of education, all of these things are becoming increasingly difficult,” said Dowell. “I think the boomers themselves don’t realize how much more difficult it is for the millennial generation today. And they think, ‘Oh yes, when we were young, we had to live, you know, with very little money, and we won, You can do it. the same.’ That’s the story, right? Well, no, it really is a lot more difficult for young people today. It’s amazing how much more difficult it is. “