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America started gettin’ real busy last year. Preliminary reports show that U.S. births are on the rise after battling years of decline, Yahoo! News says.
Almost 53,000 more babies were born in 2014 in comparison to the year prior, a one percent increase. Births rose for Black, White, Asian, and Hispanic women; a total of four million babies were born in 2014. This is the first surge in births we’ve seen since 2007.
Experts say that the uptick is mirroring America’s recovering economy; job growth is increasing. The most recent statistic from the Department of Labor shows that April 2015 gained 223,000 jobs. Consumer spending in May, according to the Department of Commerce, increased by 1.2 percent.
“The recession is ending – we think it’s ending – for some people, so we might attribute a rise in the birth rate” to the economy, Carl Haub, a senior demographer for the Population Reference Bureau, told USA Today.
Laura Lindberg, principal research scientist at the Guttmacher Institute, would agree with Haub. “I think as people feel their paycheck is more stable, it feels like a safe environment to have a child in,” she said.
The report also spotted another interesting tidbit: Teen births dropped to a historic low. According to USA Today, 2014 saw “24.2 births per 1,000 women – a nine percent drop from 2013’s 26.2 births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 19.”
Other highlights from the 2014 report include the rise of the total fertility rate to 1.9 children (2.1 is goal, experts say, to keep the population at its current level), 32 percent of women had a C-section (the ideal rate is 15 percent), and Native American mothers were the only ethnic group to see a decline in births last year.
Overall, experts say that the 2014 report is promising.
“It looks like perhaps we’re seeing the turnaround that many experts have been anticipating,” said Gretchen Livingston, a birth trends expert at Pew Research Center.
