New data confirms a baby boom that some doctors expected was actually one “baby bust.” Health departments in more than two dozen states provided data to CBS News, with a 7% drop in December births – nine months after the first lockdowns began.
Researchers say it has continued a much greater decline in fertility over the past few decades.
The number of babies the average US woman is expected to have has dropped from nearly four in the 1950s to fewer than two today.
The decline could pose a very different risk to society from what was first warned decades ago – when America hit an apocalyptic fear in the 1960s and 1970s.
“The stakes in this battle are far greater than any other we’ve ever fought,” Walter Cronkite said in a 1970 CBS News broadcast. “The experts we interviewed told us that the population was the fundamental crisis.”
As the world approached nearly 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 he wrote in 1968.
“Sometime in the next 15 years the end will come – and by the end I mean a total collapse in the planet’s ability to support humanity,” he said in a 1970 broadcast.
Today, however, a very different note is being noted by researchers such as University of Southern California Professor Dowell Myers, who studies demographic trends.
“The problem is we’ve shot too much and we’ve dropped it too much now,” Myers told “CBS This Morning” co-host Tony Dokoupil.
While the world’s population is still growing, a major study published in The Lancet in 2020 predicted it would peak in 2064, shrinking by nearly a billion people by the end of the century – with fewer are babies.
The US is already below the so-called “replacement level” by some measures, meaning fewer young people to support the country’s aging population.
Myers said of the decline, “That’s a crisis.”
“We need enough people of working age to bear the burden of these seniors who deserve their retirement, they deserve all of their rights, and they will live for another 30 years,” he said. “No one in the history of the world has had so many older people to deal with.”
The corona pandemic also makes the problem worse – despite what some people previously thought.
“We thought, oh, we would see a baby boom. But we just haven’t seen it,” said Dr. David Jaspan, chair of the Gynecology and Obstetrics Department at Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia.
Jaspan said patients are concerned not only about their health, but also their finances.
“I get a report every morning at 5:15 am on what 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 Institute has predicted “a big, lasting baby bust” of at least 300,000 fewer children by 2021.
For Laura Lindberg, who maintains reproductive data for the Guttmacher Institute, the decline in births could be a sign of progress – a sign of women’s equality and agency.
“So it’s a shift to later in life. In that shift comes more education, more career and more employment. So it’s a rearrangement of the way people grow up,” Lindberg explains.
Dowell Myers does not disagree, but on the whole 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 in his lifetime.
When asked what changed, he pointed to “the burdens of life.”
“The cost of housing, the cost of education, all these things have become more and more difficult,” Dowell said. “I don’t think the boomers themselves realize how much harder it is for millennials today. And they think, ‘Oh yeah, when we were young we had to live on very little money, and we made it, and you can do the same.’ That’s the story, isn’t it? Well no, it’s really a lot harder for young people these days. It’s amazing how much harder it is. “