The American Birth Rate: Evidences of a Coming Rise

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Abstract
Current attitudes which question the value of marriage and the family indicate that USA birth rates will remain low, but attitudes change with the times. Certain demographic realities provide a stimulus for a renewed increase in birth rates. The low rate of legitimate fertility in the late 1960''s and early 1970''s apparently was caused in large part by the postponement of marriage and childbearing among cohorts of young women; a period of rising marital fertility may be at hand during which they will make up the births they delayed. Nonmarital birth rates are likely to increase; although legal abortion stopped the upward trend in illegitimate births in 1971, in California the rate of out-of-wedlock childbearing subsequently began a renewed rise. Legal abortion probably will prevent the illegitimate birth rate from rising as fast as it would if abortion were illegal or inaccessible, but motivational and situational factors supporting out-of-wedlock childbearing remain strong. Crucial in the future trend of the overall birth rate are the large cohorts of women born during the peak baby boom years of the middle and late 1950''s. In the next 5 yr they will enter their 20''s. If present reproductive patterns continue, by 1980 their entrance into the prime reproductive ages will raise fertility by 9% for the crude birth rate and 2% for the general fertility rate; and if they do not continue the present pattern of postponing marriage and childbearing, fertility will rise even more. The American birth rate may have bottomed out; a rise in reproduction is likely.

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