America’s birthrate is at an all-time low, which means you’ll be seeing fewer couples with infants in car seats, gigantic diaper bags and sleepless eyes at your local restaurant. Time magazine’s new cover story “Having It All Without Having Children,” by Lauren Sandler breaks down the interesting trend:
From 2007 to 2011, the
most recent year for which there’s data, the fertility rate declined 9%. A 2010
Pew Research report showed that childlessness has risen across all racial and
ethnic groups, adding up to about 1 in 5 American women who end their
childbearing years maternity-free, compared with 1 in 10 in the 1970s. Even
before the recession hit, in 2008, the proportion of women ages 40 to 44 whohad
never given birth had grown by 80 percent, from 10% to 18%, since 1976, when a
new vanguard began to question the reproductive imperative… the rise [of
childlessness] is both dramatic and, in the scope of our history, quite sudden.
It may be sudden, but it’s not surprising. People now
delay marriage until after college and delay parenthood until after
establishing careers. By the time they’re finally ready, parenthood is
sometimes precluded because of the lure of occupation, the difficulty of
older-aged conception or sheer inertia....To Read More....
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