While the government should be supporting families more and economic conditions do impact people's decision to have children, there is more and more evidence coming through that shows the driving force of the falling birth rate is women having control over when and how many children they have. Access to birth control, abortions, and family planning have had a huge impact.
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While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported a historic low U.S. birth rate of 1.6 children per woman in 2024, much of the decline, said McConnell, comes from teenagers and young women delaying childbearing.
“The population where the birth rate has been declining most rapidly is actually women 15 to 20 years old,” McConnell said. With better access to contraception and sex education, she explained, teen pregnancies have fallen dramatically—a trend Tiemeier called “a big societal success.”
McConnell also cautioned that the fertility rate, measured year by year, can obscure the bigger picture: completed family size over a woman’s lifetime has not fallen nearly as sharply. “If you look at numbers…that give you a sense of how many babies women have over their lifetimes—women between 40 and 44—the number of children they’ve had is actually not changing as much over time as the fertility rate,” suggesting that the supposed crisis reflects demographic shifts rather than collapse.