A key U.S. fertility rate has reached a record low for the fourth year in a row. But is it really a record low? The short answer: It’s complicated.
American motherhood has changed in many ways since Mother’s Day was first celebrated more than 100 years ago.
About seven-in-ten U.S. parents younger than 50 say it’s unlikely they will have more children in the future.
Roughly four-in-ten U.S. adults think families of three or more children are ideal. Yet it’s still much more common for American women at the end of their childbearing years to have had one or two kids than three or more.
Forty years after the birth of the first baby conceived via in vitro fertilization, 33% of Americans say they or someone they know has undergone fertility treatment.
American women are waiting longer to have children than in the past, but they are still starting their families sooner than women in many other developed nations.
In all, more than 17 million Millennial women in the U.S. have become mothers. In 2016, Millennial women accounted for 82% of U.S. births.
The share of U.S. women at the end of their childbearing years who have ever given birth was higher in 2016 than it had been 10 years earlier.
Without a 6% increase in births to foreign-born women between 1990 and 2015, an overall decline in annual U.S. births would have been even larger.
One-in-seven U.S. infants were multiracial or multiethnic in 2015, nearly triple the share in 1980.
