Babies: Quantity plummeting, quality ... not so bad

Not quite all the numbers about birth trends are alarming.

Fertility is of course falling around much of the world, including in the U.S. Much of the decline in the U.S. came in the second half of the 2010s, before covid.

The CDC offers a Natality interface for looking up birth data in the U.S., but it’s a little more awkward than its Mortality interface.

Here are graphs I made for total number of births to white mothers and black mothers. I narrowed them down to non-Hispanic women born in the U.S. to reduce impact of immigration. For some reason, the CDC doesn’t make it easy to find fertility rates, so I’m looking just at two pretty stable traditional U.S. populations.

Paywall here.