America Heading Towards 'National Emergency' as Birth Rate Plunges to Historic Low, Experts Warn
Experts are raising the alarm that America is headed for a "national emergency" that could spell economic and cultural disaster as it recorded its lowest birth rate in history last year.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released new data on June 30 showing that U.S. birth rates hit a historic low in 2016 when they fell 1 percent from the figures in 2015, the year when birth rates suffered a record drop.
The total number of births in the U.S. in 2016 was 3,941,109 — 1 percent or 37,388 fewer than 2015's figure.
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The CDC report noted that the birth rate for teenagers aged 15–19 declined 9 percent in 2016. The rate also declined among women under 30.
The birth rate among women in their 30s and 40s increased slightly — 1 percent and .04 percent, respectively. But the rise was not enough to offset the overall decline, the report said.
A country's birth rate is one of the most important measures in determining the health of a nation, according to The Washington Post.
According to experts, the birth rate needs to be within a certain range, called the "replacement level," to keep a population stable so that it neither grows nor shrinks.
If the number is too low, a nation may face the danger of failing to replace its aging workforce and have enough tax revenue to keep the economy stable. Countries such as France and Japan are facing this problem, prompting them to adopt pro-family policies to try to encourage couples to have babies.
On the other hand, birth rates that are too high are also problematic since they can strain a country's resources such as clean water, food, shelter and social services. This is the problem facing India, where the fertility rate remains high even though it had fallen over the past few decades.
Demographer and author Philip Longman maintains that "falling birth rates threaten world prosperity, asserting that the "ongoing global decline in human birth rates is the single most powerful force affecting the fate of nations and the future of society in the 21st century."
Some studies have linked the declining birth rate in the West to the Sexual Revolution of the 1970s, when the birth control pill was made widely available as a form of contraception, Church Militant reported.
"Contraception made easy, the divorce revolution, more women joining the workforce ahead of thinking about marriage and the sexual revolution that erupted since the 70s were all contributors," it said. "But the greatest impact on fertility was from the pill, which eliminated the unwanted pregnancies of 70 percent of married women."
