Nearly half of U.S. women under 45 are childless

US births continue to decline as nearly half of women under 45 are childless: study (nypost.com), By Allie Griffin January 12, 2023

Nearly half of American women under 45 are childless, according to a new study.

About 52% of women between the ages of 15 to 44 gave birth between 2015 to 2019 -- a drop from nearly 55% in the prior four-year period, according to the study published by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics.

The number of biological fathers in the same age range also dipped. From 2015 to 2019, about 40% of men had fathered a child -- compared to about 44% during 2011 to 2015.

The number of babies each woman is birthing decreased as well and more and more women are putting off childbearing to later in life.

The drop in birthrate is especially prevalent among white women.

This is going to have big demographic implications for the future.

And what is happening in the U.S. is mirroring what has already begun in Japan. (The U.S. currently about where Japan was 15 years ago)

Part of this is due to many young families not feeling they can afford to have children. Part of that is the high cost of housing in many areas.

 

I wonder why it is that white people are hesitant to have children they can't afford more so than others?

 

Probably because they have expectations about living standards and are very reluctant to raise a family if they're going to be living in poverty.

Other groups often have lower expectations about living standards, and find it more natural to start a family even if they will not have much money and might live in overcrowded conditions.

 

Particularly when the government incentivizes such irresponsible breeding

 

@kazenatsu @FatBack I think a greater factor in in the drop in birthrate for women under 45 is simply the evolution of the so called "sexual revolution". Women probably do not feel the need to remain in traditional roles and raise children. Young woman may be concentrating on other things like career or other personal fulfillment outside the traditional roles of family. You gave the example of Japan, and I think the changing roles is a greater factor than people not being able to afford children.

 

What I see around me is uncertainty. To put it bluntly
the US is being shut down, and possibly the rest of
the world, and there are big doubts about the future.

The Presidents before and after Trump all started wars
and put the nation in debt, no Trump would not have
except for COVID, and his belief turned out to be the
correct response to COVID, nothing more extreme was
warranted. He bet his own life on it when he got it.

And the Global Warming people convinced many that
the world was coming to an end, so why invest huge
amounts of money and effort into children?

 

That's probably a good thing as I think the earth is way over populated.

 

The U.S. will just make up the difference by bringing in more immigration from other countries that do not have lower birthrates, even though they are poor.

Ultimately, since the majority of the earth's population do not live in developed countries, birthrates going down in developed countries will be like a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the overall global population.

I don't know if you've seen that "Immigration, World Poverty and Gumballs" video.

 

That's not the case. East Asians are perhaps even more reluctant to have children they can't afford, as demonstrated by the crashing birth rates in Japan, Korea, China, etc.

 

I lived in Tokyo for three years, where a population equivalent to Canada lived in an area of 5Kkm^2. It was very pleasant and livable.

Overpopulation is a myth. There is under-honesty, under-wisdom, under-justice, under-honesty, under-liberty, under-education and under-honesty, but not overpopulation.

 

The birth statistics seem to suggest that that is the case.

 

If it was due to costs it wouldn’t be whites not having babies. The majority of wealth is held by whites. I would argue that it’s a societal problem with mixed issues not just cost. It’s the belief among younger kids that they would rather party than grow up and raise a family. It’s also the fact that more women have to work than have time to stay home and raise a family. It’s also cost I’m sure to some degree. I’ve seen studies that suggest the more intelligent you are the less likely you are to have kids as well. It’s crazy all the excuses I have heard concerning this subject.

 

I've already explained that.
I explained how costs can affect the decisions of one group more than another group.
I do think the issue mainly has to do with costs. Although of course there are some big societal and cultural issues at play.

 

The reasons why birth rates go down have to do with high costs of living, combined with (relatively) attractive job opportunities (outside the home) for women.

Also, I think, when the differential between male and female pay narrows, women have less children. When men can earn a lot more than women, then usually the man will work and the woman will take care of the home.

It has to do with "opportunity costs", or trade-offs.
Consider a case where the rent is 2500 a month but the woman can earn 5000 a month (if she works full time), versus a case where rent is only 900 a month but the woman can only earn 1800 a month (if she works full time). In the second case, the woman will be more likely to not work so much, even if that will mean she lives in poverty. Notice how the ratio of housing expenses to potential income still remains the same in both cases. In the second case, the woman will only need enough money to pay the small amount of rent (and basic living expenses), but then is not very incentivized to earn more money than that. In the first case, the woman could not even afford to live there if she only worked half-time.
Assuming that both women are earning (or provided with) enough to pay for their basic housing and living expenses, the woman who earns more money has more to gain by working more hours. (Or rather it could be said that the woman earning less has less to lose by working less hours)

 

Here's one interesting article I found from The Atlantic.
I've included just selected parts of the article to try to condense it down a little bit and highlight what I feel are the more important parts.

Why Are Women Freezing Their Eggs? Look to the Men

The struggling American man is one of the few objects of bipartisan concern. Both conservatives and liberals bemoan men’s underrepresentation in higher education, their greater likelihood to die a "death of despair," and the growing share of them who are not working or looking for work. But the chorus of concern rarely touches on how male decline shapes the lives of the people most likely to date or marry them--that is to say, women.

In Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs, Marcia C. Inhorn, a medical anthropologist at Yale, tells this side of the story. Beginning in 2014, she conducted interviews with 150 American women who had frozen their eggs--most of them heterosexual women who wanted a partner they could have and raise children with. She concluded that, contrary to the commonly held notion that most professional women were freezing their eggs so they could lean into their jobs, "Egg freezing was not about their careers. It was about being single or in very unstable relationships with men who were unwilling to commit to them."

Behind the rise of egg freezing is a larger story of what Inhorn calls "the mating gap." As she notes, in 2012, female college graduates outnumbered male graduates by 34 percent; today, she estimates, nearly 3 million more women than men hold college degrees among Americans ages 22 to 39. Barring a dramatic reversal, this gap will only grow—in the past four years, estimated national undergraduate enrollment has included roughly 3 million more women than men. According to Inhorn, these numbers explain why, today, educated women who want a male partner to parent with are hard-pressed to find someone displaying the characteristics she calls “the three e's--eligible, educated, and equal" (and, I would add, "eager" to commit) as they seek "the three p's of partnership, pregnancy, and parenthood." Egg freezing is, as Inhorn puts it, "women's technological concession to a U.S. gender problem."

Clearly, egg freezing is not a sustainable or scalable answer to the problem of structurally mismatched desires and expectations. But does it present a solution for the individual women who choose to undergo it? The stories in her book don’t provide a tidy "yes" or "no"; rather, they raise deeper questions about heterosexual relationships today, ones that have implications for overall fertility rates, the U.S. economy, and the future of the family. Most of all, her book captures the pain of women who struggle to fulfill the human desires for companionship and parenthood, pain that has been too long overlooked in the broader discussions about egg freezing.

The demand for egg freezing has not gone unnoticed by investors, who have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into egg-freezing "studios" and clinics that aim to make the process more consumer-friendly. In the U.S., the procedure can cost anywhere from $7,500 to $18,000 per cycle, plus annual storage fees of $500 to $1,000 a year. Some patients undergo multiple cycles in order to bank the recommended 15 to 20 eggs that clinicians generally advise for a reasonable chance of a live birth.

About 20 percent of the women Inhorn interviewed froze their eggs for medical reasons, such as before beginning cancer treatment that could potentially harm their reproductive capacity. But much of the book is given over to women’s stories, by turns heartbreaking and infuriating, of dealing with unsatisfactory relationships.

Take Kayla, a professional with an Ivy League MBA, who had frozen her eggs at 38 while dating Matt, until she finally realized after a year and a half that he was "never going to commit." Or Lily, a curator whose long-term partner Jack ran down her reproductive clock over nearly a decade, dangling the prospect of marriage and children but never following through, leading her to freeze her eggs at the late age of 43. Or Tiffany, a woman with engineering and MBA degrees living in Washington, D.C., who, after dating men from all educational backgrounds, still hadn't found a partner and put two egg-freezing cycles on a zero-interest credit card.

Based on these patterns, Inhorn categorizes this army of the "unready or unwilling" into 10 archetypes the women claim are responsible for their dating misery, among them "feminist men" who "claim they are feminist but do not pitch in, pay, or help out, all in the name of gender equality"; "Peter Pans," who are prolonging adolescence "sometimes well into their forties and beyond, with no immediate plans for marriage"; and "younger men" who "no longer believe in dating and don’t know how to do it."

In sociological research, education level is strongly correlated with household income, and together these factors can be a proxy for whether a person is an "eligible" partner. As long as these patterns hold, the growing chasm between college-educated men and women is going to leave some women partnerless.

But beyond these numerical facts, many egg freezers struggle to explain why, despite their best efforts at dating, they remain single. Are these fewer educated men realizing that the numbers are in their favor, and with a limitless supply of women served up on dating apps, they don’t feel the need to commit? Are the women in the book still single because they are stuck dating the "dregs" of the male species, as one woman put it to Inhorn, until a wave of divorces will "release some decent men so she can have a turn"? Is part of the problem that "decent" is often code for "college-educated"?

Nearly three decades ago, the sociologist William Julius Wilson cited male joblessness as the reason behind the decline in marriage in some predominantly Black communities (and the pool of available men has shrunk since the late 1970s because of Black men's disproportionately high rates of incarceration and mortality). More recently, economists have documented falling marriage rates in pockets of the U.S. where men have lost manufacturing jobs (notably in sectors facing competition from cheap Chinese imports). Unlike the egg freezers, women in these communities typically do not defer childbearing until their late 30s, but instead have children at earlier ages and raise them on their own.​

Why Are Women Freezing Their Eggs? Look to the Men. by Anna Louie Sussman, (in Books section) The Atlantic, September 14, 2023

related thread: Here's one reason white women are not having kids

 

The article appears not to mention the main reason the minority of men whom women consider the most "eligible" are not interested in committing to marriage and children: Internet dating makes it possible for them to enjoy as many different women as they can handle. You've heard of people in countries that don't have democratic elections "voting with their feet" by leaving? Women are voting for polygamy with a different part of their anatomy.

 

related thread about that here: Alex Youseff on Hookup Culture (posted in Women's Rights section)

 

But Americans are not dying out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States
(see table: Historical Population)

 

It depends how you define "Americans".
The total American population is growing due to immigration coming in from other parts of the world.
Not counting those immigrants, the rest of the American population is in decline. Especially the white population (with European ancestry).

related thread if anyone wants to read more: White population smaller in newest generation than in older generations (posted in Race Relations section)

 

Evolution in action.

 

People understandably aren't that keen on shouldering the physical, emotional, and financial burdens of raising children just for them to be economic cannon fodder for the greedy, privileged, parasitic rich to eat.

 

I guess the idea of a "core family" takes a back seat behind money and having nice "stuff" while kids are considered a nuisance.

And the usual suspects try to twist it into a race issue, but its about US women on general, and there isn't too much difference between black vs white women (blacks = 60.2 per 1000 women, vs whites = 54.4 per 1000)

 

I doubt that's anyone's concern when it comes to deciding to have children.

 

I think the physical, emotional, and financial considerations are top criteria. What other reasons can you think of that are ahead of those?

 

Individual people can have all sorts of reasons for wanting to have children, or deciding not to have children. The real question for this discussion thread is what is responsible for the change over time?