Last year, the fertility rate fell to 53.1 births per 1,000 women ages 15-44 from 53.8 in 2024, provisional numbers released Wednesday show. This 1% decrease is part of the 23% decline since 2007, according to the report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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To keep the population at “replacement rates,” women would have to have 2.1 children each, Wellesley College economics professor Phillip Levine told Yahoo. That would replace herself and her partner and provide “a little extra” to make up for deaths among children and working adults, he said.
Declining fertility rates can be a concern in terms of workforce shrinkage and fewer people contributing to publicly-funded programs, such as Social Security and Medicare.
The continued slide in the overall U.S. fertility rate is partly due to the rate for teenagers ages 15-19 reached an historic low in 2025. The rate for that age group was 11.7 births per 1,000 women last year, down 7% from 2024 when there were 12.6 births per 1,000 women.
“Women now have better control over their reproductive lives, so there’s not as much unintended pregnancy as there used to be,” Dr. Alison Gemmill, an associate professor of epidemiology at the UCLA School of Public Health, told CNN. “Our timelines have shifted.”
The data also showed that fertility rates for women ages 30-44 increased from 2024 to 2025.
The rates rose to 96.2 per 1,000 women in 2025 from 93.7 in 2024 for women ages 30-34; to 55.1 in 2025 from 54.3 in 2024 for women ages 35-39; and to 12.8 in 2025 from 12.7 in 2024 for women ages 40-44.
The numbers confirm that women are having children later, but the increase in later-in-life fertility rates may not be enough to offset the drop in fertility rates among younger women, Gemmill said.
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