US teen pregnancy rate falls to historic low

Birth rate among U.S. teens fell 10 percent between 2012 and 2013, and births among younger women reached record lows, according to government statistics released on Thursday.

The general fertility rate in the United States was 62.9 births per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44, a record low, according to the report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics.

The birth rate for teens aged 15 to 19 dropped 10 percent to 26.6 births per 1,000 women, a historic low. The report also showed that the birth rate and number of births among girls ages 10 to 14 also plummeted to historic lows, decreasing 15 percent in 2013 to 0.3 births per 1,000 women.

“Certainly the drop in the teen birth rate is pretty astounding," Carl Haub, senior demographer with the Population Reference Bureau, told Reuters.

He said the drop could likely be attributed to educational efforts to prevent teen pregnancy and that economic factors also affected the rate, which began to fall dramatically during the recession that began in 2007. The current teen pregnancy rate has declined 36 percent since that year and 57 percent since 1991.

The birth rate for women in their early 20s declined by 2 percent to a record low as well, the report said, to 81.2 births per 1,000 women.

The total number of births in the U.S. between 2012 and 2013 — 3,957,577 —represented an increase of only about 4,700 births among all U.S. women, following a five-year span in which the number of children born dropped each year, starting in 2007.

Experts have blamed the downward trend mainly on the nation's economy, which was in recession from 2007 to 2009 and wobbly for at least two years after that. Many couples had money problems and felt they couldn't afford to start or add to their family.

William Frey, demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., told Al Jazeera that the recession "affected people here in the United States, delaying marriage along with child bearing, buying a home.” Now the economy has picked up and so has childbearing, at least in women ages 30 and older.

The drop in the number of deliveries is a relatively new phenomenon in the U.S. The number of total births was on the rise since the late 1990s and hit an all-time high of more than 4.3 million in 2007. Then came the decrease attributed to the nation's flagging economy.

The nation appears to be seeing a shift to having children a bit later in life, Rob Stephenson, an Emory University demographer focused on reproductive health, told The Associated Press. That follows a trend Western Europe experienced more than a decade ago, he said.

"Maybe the new norm is having children in your 30s," he said.

For example, the birth rate for women in their early 30s rose by 1 percent in 2013 to reach 98.7 births per 1,000 women, and the birth rates for women in their late 30s rose by 3 percent to reach 49.6 births per 1,000 women, the highest in this latter age group since 1963.

And among women aged 40 to 44, birth rates rose 1 percent to reach 10.5 births per 1,000 women, the highest since 1966.

"We are going up the age ladder and have been for many, many years," said Haub, adding that more women are opting to postpone childbirth to get a higher education or establish themselves in their careers.

In terms of race, the number of births rose a little for both white and black women, and stayed the same for Hispanic and Native American women. And for some reason demographers in the report can't explain, it fell 2 percent for Asian women.

The CDC report is based on a review of more than 99 percent of U.S. birth certificates from 2012. Statistics have been calculated and analyzed since 1940.

Al Jazeera and wire services