Compared to 2020, in 2021 the USA saw a 1% increase in birth rate. It seems small, but it is not at all, since this is the first increase in seven years.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) gave these numbers, which have been confirmed by Dr. Denise Jamieson, who heads the Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics in the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia, and who also cautiously points out that we have not yet returned to pre-pandemic levels of COVID-19, the virus recognized among those responsible for the collapse in births in the past two years.
This is finally some good news after so much talk about the “demographic winter,” a perfect and fitting definition that Monsignor Michel Schooyan (1930-2022), who died recently, gave of the cradle crisis in the Western world. Prior to the 2021 data, the US birth rate had declined by an average of 2 percent each year, but last year 3.7 million births were reported, compared with 3.6 million, more or less, recorded in 2020.
It is possible that the great fear and uncertainty felt by so many at the beginning of the pandemic is responsible for the decline in conceptions noted in 2020, amid lockdowns and worries of all kinds brought about by the coronavirus, and the more serene and less stringent situation in the following year prompted couples to invest better and more in their families.
In each case, birth rates increased for both Hispanic and white women, by 1 percent and 3 percent, respectively. Among Asian, black and Native American and Alaska Native women, on the other hand, the numbers fell by between 1 percent and 4 percent over the year.
Birth rates among adolescent girls have decreased significantly, to 6 percent, while they have increased for women who are no longer very young. Data, in fact, show that births have increased between 3 percent and 5 percent for women between the ages of 30 and 40. They look like small numbers, but they tell of many more children.
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