wng.org
2026-05-01
New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirms what demographers have been watching with growing alarm: American women are having fewer children than ever before. The U.S. fertility rate dropped to 53.1 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age in 2025, and the total fertility rate--the average number of children a woman will have over her lifetime--fell to a record low of 1.57, well below the replacement rate of 2.1. Total births fell one full percent from the previous year, to just over 3.6 million.
These numbers did not arrive in a vacuum. They are the product of decades of technological, economic, cultural, and policy shifts.
The most striking data point isn't the overall birth rate. It's this: for the first time, nearly half of all 30-year-old American women are childless. In 1976, that figure was just 18 percent. Research suggests that women who are childless at 30 face roughly even odds of ever having kids. This is no longer a story about teenagers delaying motherhood until their twenties. It is increasingly a story about women entering their thirties without children and running out of time.
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