Fertility Crisis - A New Take

Demographer Lyman Stone again.

"The most important fact to understand about fertility declines is that marital fertility rates have not changed much in decades. Married people make babies just like they always have. There just aren't as many of them anymore."

"But the one category of marital duration where fertility HAS fallen is at <9 months. People are WAY less likely to marry BECAUSE they are pregnant than they used to be."

Statistician Cremieux Recueil concurs 

"Compositionally, the decline has more to do with a shift to lower marriage rates than with fertility falling among the married and unmarried." Very nice graph since 1980 there.

I continue to be surprised whenever I think of this. We have grown used to the bare statistic that everyone is having fewer babies, and I have reflected on my impression of how everyone used to have larger families. That is slightly true but mostly because contraceptive availability increased in my generation, so the large families I remembered were my peers, conceived in the 1950s. When I reflected on the families I knew then, then compared them to the number of children that each of them had in the 70s- early 90s, the contraction was already apparent. (There is selection bias across the generations on that, I know.  But still...)

I noticed, I guess not shockingly, that all the Jewish families (about 20 in my circle) had exactly two children. With intermarriage, I don't know how that shook out. Orthodox families have always had more children, but I didn't know any. Still don't.

The first part of the graph seems explainable. Few unwed people had children in the 60s, and it only gradually increased but it did increase steadily. Then it leveled off, then declined, and always much less than married people. I recall reading long ago that that women tended to marry before the second pregnancy instead of the first now, whenever "now" was. Couples deciding this was going to be more permanent for the children's sake, people finding better spouses by some metric.  I don't know how that fits definitionally into these numbers, as they straddle categories.

Still, it's going to take me a while to fully absorb this. Also, with the steeper, more recent decline in the last few years, is this still the driver? Has the marriage difference run its course and a new factor taken over? And what about all the other stories about family formation and housing, and the sudden decline when car seats became mandatory because you couldn't fit three in the back? Is there anything to them?