Birth rates continue to fall – except, that is, among one group.
Specifically, older women – ages 35 and over – are getting pregnant at increasing rates. According to a recently published report from the National Center for Health Statistics, the fertility rate among women ages 35 to 39 went up 71% between 1990 and 2023; among women ages 40 to 44, the rate increased 127%.
“There’s a flip in the age distribution,” Elizabeth Wildsmith, a sociologist at research group Child Trends, added to NBC News. The shift, she continued, can be attributed to a range of factors, including economic concerns, career priorities and changing social norms. “All of those conditions shape when people want to start having children.”
That said, more and more people are opting out altogether, part of a larger, decades-long decline – the birth rate overall fell about 14% in the same time period, the report states. This has been driven by a shift in younger people’s habits, with teenagers accounting for just 4% of births in 2023, as opposed to 13% of them in 1990.
Though heartened by the waning number of teenage parents, some experts did express concern regarding the well-being of older pregnant people – as well as their children. Those risks include genetic and chromosomal abnormalities in fetuses, and pre-eclampsia, gestational diabetes and postpartum hemorrhage in parents.
“We’re seeing more and more people who come into pregnancy in their 40s who already have high blood pressure, kidney disease or diabetes,” Dr. Arianna Cassidy, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist at University of California, San Francisco, added to NBC. “Age is not a modifiable thing.”
