A little under 3.6 million babies were born in 2023, according to provisional statistics released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s about 76,000 fewer than the year before and the lowest one-year tally since 1979.

U.S. births fell last year, resuming a long national slide.

A little under 3.6 million babies were born in 2023, according to provisional statistics released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s about 76,000 fewer than the year before and the lowest one-year tally since 1979.

U.S. births were slipping for more than a decade before COVID-19 hit, then dropped 4% from 2019 to 2020. They ticked up for two straight years after that, an increase experts attributed, in part, to pregnancies that couples had put off amid the pandemic’s early days.

But “the 2023 numbers seem to indicate that bump is over and we’re back to the trends we were in before,” said Nicholas Mark, a University of Wisconsin researcher who studies how social policy and other factors influence health and fertility.

  • @qjkxbmwvz
    -4•2 months ago

    We live in a high CoL area, and in our experience the only financial line items from having a kid that matter are housing and childcare: we pay more on daycare than we did on rent before kid when we lived in a studio. Baby food is only used for a little while, and if you prefer, most of it is easy to make yourself.

    And private daycare (or nanny) should be expensive, because caregivers should be making a living wage.

    The only options I see to bring down costs are to exploit caregivers more than they already are (this is very wrong), to rely on grandparents for childcare, or to implement publicly funded daycare across the board.