America's Baby Bust

It's Worse Than You Think

Lost in the chaos of last week’s news about the border and primary elections were new vital birth statistics for 2023. While we’re still waiting on the last quarter of the year, we have a good estimation for what 2023 looked like with respect to the nation's fertility, and it is not good.

The U.S. fertility rate is expected to be 1.62 children per woman in 2023, with a total of 3,287,450 born in the first 11 months, down from 1.67 in 2022 when 3,667,758 were children born.

According to the Twitter account Birth Gauge, which tracks fertility rates around the globe, not a single state in the country reached the 2.12 children per woman threshold to have a fertility rate above replacement levels. The closest were prairie states like South Dakota, Nebraska, North Dakota, Iowa, and Kansas. A handful of other states, including Utah, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Kentucky, also had fertility rates significantly higher than the national average.

States that voted for Joe Biden had lower overall fertility rates and the largest decline from the year prior (-2.9 percent) but more births, with 1,779,614 children being born in blue states and 1,507,836 children born in red states. Even though they had higher overall fertility rates, the number of births fell in red states by -0.8 percent.