By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Writer
The year 2007 is destined for the history books. According to federal researchers, more babies were born in the U.S. in 2007 than in any year in the nation’s history, easily topping the peak during the baby boom years.
According to the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control, a review of 2007 birth certificates indicates that the U.S. experienced a baby boomlet in 2007 with 4.3 million babies born. These numbers put the national fertility rate at 2.1 babies per woman, a much healthier rate than most European countries are experiencing.
The study found fertility rates to be high across every racial group with the highest rates found among Hispanics. The state of Utah had the most births with the state of Vermont having the least.
However, there was a downside to the numbers. The teen birth rate was up for the second year in a row and births to unwed mothers reached an all-time high of about 40 percent. More than three-quarters of these women were 20 or older.
For a variety of reasons, it’s become more acceptable for women to have babies without a husband, said Duke University’s S. Philip Morgan, a leading fertility researcher to the Associated Press.
Morgan believes cultural attitudes have a lot to do with the trends, noting the pregnancy of Bristol Palin, the unmarried teen daughter of former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Bristol had a baby boy in December and recently called off plans to marry the child’s father, Levi Johnston.
“She’s the poster child for what you do when you get pregnant now,” Morgan said.
The rise in the teen birth rate is more difficult to explain, however. Sarah Brown, chief executive for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy believes it may be due to a concentrated societal effort to reduce teen births in the 1990s that has waned in recent years.
Meanwhile, US abortions have been dropping to their lowest levels in decades, according to other reports. Some have contributed the decline to the introduction of abstinence education in schools while others say it is due to increased contraceptive use.
The connection between abortion and pre-term birth may also explain why the pre-term birth rate also appears to be in a downturn.
Researchers are not sure how long the boomlet will last. Some experts think birth rates are already declining because of the economic recession that began in late 2007.
“I expect they’ll go back down. The lowest birth rates recorded in the United States occurred during the Great Depression – and that was before modern contraception,” said Dr. Carol Hogue, an Emory University professor of maternal and child health.
CDC officials say this record number of births is not comparable to what occurred in the 1950’s because during that baby boom, fewer women were having an average of four babies each.
Today, U.S. women are averaging 2.1 children each. That’s the highest level it’s been since the early 1970s, but is a relatively small increase from the rate it had hovered at for more than 10 years.
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