America’s baby bust: U.S. birth rate hits record low as women choose later motherhood

New CDC data reveals a generational shift in reproductive choices, with younger women stepping back from parenthood while those in their 30s and 40s are having more babies than ever

By Jane James

Sarah Harris was 36 years old when she brought her daughter Bridget home for the first time. She describes the experience of late motherhood with the kind of candour that comes from living it: equal parts joy and exhaustion, wisdom gained and energy lost. “When you have a baby in your mid-30s, what you gain in wisdom and experience you also lose in terms of energy,” she says, with a laugh that carries more than a little truth. Harris, who lives in the state of Vermont in the northeastern United States, was laid off from her job just four months after Bridget was born. She is still, by her own account, working out what her career and her life now look like with a child in the picture.

She also knows, with quiet certainty, that Bridget will be her only child. The cost of raising children in America today made that decision for her as much as anything else. “I think in another era, or another life, or another scenario, I might have had more children,” she says. “I think we’re in a difficult societal moment, and that is absolutely affecting people’s reproductive choices.”

Harris is not alone. She is, in fact, one face of a slow but unmistakable revolution reshaping what parenthood looks like in the United States — and the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirms just how far that revolution has advanced. The general fertility rate for American women fell by one per cent in 2025 to a new record low, extending a two-decade trend of declining births that has steadily and fundamentally altered the country’s demographic landscape.

The sharpest declines were among the youngest women. Brady Hamilton, a demographer at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics and co-author of the report, described the six per cent drop in the birth rate for women aged 20 to 24 as particularly striking. Women in their late teens recorded an even steeper fall of seven per cent. These are not marginal statistical movements. They represent a generational withdrawal from parenthood that is now drawing serious attention from researchers, policymakers, and healthcare professionals alike.

A separate study released last month by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta added further texture to the picture. It found that women from Generation Z — broadly those in their late teens and twenties — are dramatically less likely to want children than women of previous generations at the same stage of life. The study identified several contributing factors: expanded labour market opportunities and greater personal agency among women, rising financial costs, shifting priorities, and growing concerns about maternal mortality. Taken together, these factors are producing a cohort of young women who are not simply postponing parenthood — many are reconsidering it altogether.

Dr. Tanise Branche, medical director of labour and delivery at Temple Health, a health research and training network based in Philadelphia, sees this shift clearly in her patients. More of her younger women patients, she says, are following a different life script from the one their mothers and grandmothers followed. “They’re starting to focus not necessarily just on what they can bring to kids, but what’s going to be best for them,” she says. It is a subtle but significant change in orientation — from obligation toward deliberate, self-directed choice.

Branche is herself part of the countervailing trend that the CDC data also captures. While birth rates among younger women are falling, women aged 30 to 45 are recording a small but statistically significant increase in pregnancies. Branche is currently pregnant with her fourth child. “I will be 43 with my last delivery, and I started this reproductive journey at 37,” she says. “I see the net positive being that we have a choice.” That word — choice — sits at the heart of what this demographic shift is really about. For many women, having children later is not a compromise. It is a considered decision made from a position of greater financial stability, professional grounding, and personal readiness.

Anna Louie Sussman, author of a new book on parenting choices titled Inconceivable, is candid about the forces driving the trend. She points to a tension that many young Americans are living with daily: they want families, but cannot see a realistic path to affording them. “The fact that there are a lot of people who still say they want families, but don’t feel like they’re able to have them, is a concern,” she says. “Young people say, I can barely take care of myself — I can’t imagine taking care of someone else.” Sussman herself froze her eggs because of her own concerns about affordability and career timing, eventually having her child in her early 40s. “I do feel lucky that I’m a little further along professionally than I would have been in my 20s or even 30s,” she says.

The experts are clear on what would make a difference. Many women, they argue, would choose to have more children if the structural conditions existed to support them — affordable housing, accessible childcare, and comprehensive health insurance. In their absence, the decision to delay or forgo parenthood is not simply a matter of changing values. It is a rational economic response to a system that has not kept pace with the realities of modern life.

The demographic consequences of these choices are already visible and accelerating. The population of Americans under 18 is falling steadily, having dropped by more than one million between 2010 and 2020, according to the US Census Bureau. The median age of the American population reached 39.4 years in 2025 — a figure that, a generation ago, would have seemed remarkable. Several states, including Vermont, are already experiencing outright population decline. For Harris, that is not an abstraction. It is the elementary school down the road, and the quiet, persistent question of whether it will still be open in ten years’ time. “I think about it a lot,” she says, “because I live in a very small place where we’re hoping to keep the doors of our elementary school open for as long as we can.”

America is growing older, having fewer children, and doing so later. The data makes that plain. What it does not yet answer is whether the country’s institutions — its schools, its housing markets, its healthcare system, its workplace policies — will adapt quickly enough to meet the generation that is choosing to build families on its own terms, in its own time.

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