The New York Times recently published an interesting, yet disturbing article by Lyman Stone, “American women are having fewer children than they'd like.” He noted that American fecundity (he called it fertility, not realizing the difference in medical terminology) was precipitously declining. In 2017 his team of forecasters predicted a decline to 3.84 million births from 3.95 million in 2016, down 3.8% from 2015 and 16.4% in 2007. This is dramatic and worrisome!
What the causes are is unclear, but the same trend is seen almost all over the world, more pronounced, of course, in the economically more prosperous nations. This decline is observed primarily among young women, while older women over age 40 actually have increased their efforts to have children, as previously repeatedly noted in the VOICE.
A main reason appears to be the delay in pairing up of millennials. The average age of bearing a first child is now up to age 26 in the U.S., an age where women in prior centuries often already completed their families. In some European country, the mean age of first pregnancy has risen to above age 30. The U.S., therefore, can expect further acceleration in currently already troublesome trends. This, of course, has tremendous consequences for the medical practice of infertility but also for a variety of national interests, from politics, economics and even national security.
Most interesting is, however, a previously unreported fact: Young women currently still want to have on average 2.7 children; yet, apparently, will end up having only 1.8. This gap between what they allegedly desire and what they will end up having is the largest in 40 years. One reason identified by the authors is a dramatic decline in how much sexual activity Americans of younger ages engage in. According to the General Social Survey, 20% of 18- to 30-year-olds did not have sex at all in the preceding year. Between 1990 and 2010, this number was 10%. Millennials, thus, exhibit the lowest rates of sexual intimacy in decades. It appears time to pay attention!
This is a part of the March 2018 CHR VOICE.
Norbert Gleicher, MD, leads CHR’s clinical and research efforts as Medical Director and Chief Scientist. A world-renowned specialist in reproductive endocrinology, Dr. Gleicher has published hundreds of peer-reviewed papers and lectured globally while keeping an active clinical career focused on ovarian aging, immunological issues and other difficult cases of infertility.
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