Friday, September 30, 2016

Fertility rates may be dropping, but not that fast

Sometimes I can be idly reading through some fluff when I get stopped in my tracks. That happened this morning when I read in the NZ Herald:

According to the 2014 US Census, 47.6 per cent of women go through their peak-fertility years (ages 15 to 44) without giving birth.
This can only be read as 47.6% of women over 44 don't have children.

A ridiculous claim. So I googled it, betting it was a mangling of some fact by the writer.

The Huffington Post describes what is actually happening:

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, in 2014, 47.6 percent of women between age 15 and 44 had never had children, up from 46.5 percent in 2012. This represents the highest percentage of childless women since the bureau started tracking that data in 1976.
Time reported that this pattern is particularly pronounced for women between 25 and 29 — 49.6 percent of women in that age group don’t have kids. Unsurprisingly, after age 30 those numbers drop and more women become moms. The survey found that 28.9 percent of women ages 30-34 are childfree.
And it will drop further after age 34.

From the US census:

2.0 - Average number of children that women age 40 to 44 had given birth to as of 2014, down from 3.1 children in 1976, the year the Census Bureau first began collecting such data. The percentage of women in this age group who had ever given birth was 85 percent in 2014, down from 90 percent in 1976.

So now we have 15% of women go through their peak fertility years (15-44) without giving birth.

Fertility rates may be dropping, but not that fast.


2 comments:

Redbaiter said...

This is probably unwelcome advice, but Western women need to understand very fast that their immediate priority should be rapid and numerous procreation.

Here's why.

Lindsay Mitchell said...

Smart guy. Look at what else he said:

"He said that, for example, many increasingly “outsource” responsibility for picking up the pieces from failed relationships to the welfare state."

Spot on. It's reprehensible.