While MTV and Dr. Drew would love to take credit for the dip in teen pregnancies, experts believe the poor economy is the reason fewer babies are being born in the United States.
According to a government report released yesterday, there’s been a major dip in the number of teens and females in their early 20s giving birth. In fact, the federal study found that pregnancy among young women has fallen to the lowest rates since record-keeping began in the 1940s.
The startling statistics published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has financial experts crediting the slumping economy as being the “best form of birth control.”
Research shows that birth rates have been declining in the last three years after hitting an all-time high in 2007, at more than 4.3 million. In 2008 that number dropped slightly to 4.2 million, and in 2009 it fell again to 4.1 million. Last year the number of babies born in the United States dipped to 4 million.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt now that it was the recession. It could not be anything else,” Carl Haub, a demographer with the Population Reference Bureau, a Washington, D.C.-based research organization, told the Associated Press.
Haub and other money experts believe that women feel they can’t afford to support a child when the economy is in the dumpster.
I’m sure that is the case for young professionals; however, I’m not sure the theory applies to teens.
Have you watched an episode of 16 and Pregnant or Teen Mom? Believe me; those kids were not thinking about the economy when they were procreating. What’s more, having babies when they were babies themselves, and then allowing reality TV cameras to follow their every move has catapulted them into a whole other tax bracket where lack of money is no longer a concern… but that’s fodder for another blog.
The study also found the rate of cesarean sections flattened for the first time since 1996 and that if the current birth rate continues a woman will likely give birth to 1.9 children in her lifetime. That figure was 2.1 last year.
Has the economy affected your plans to have a baby?