Lower fertility is typically pitched as a bad thing, but it can be good in some ways, such as more women going to college and building careers or fewer unplanned teen pregnancies. For NYT’s the Upshot, Claire Cain Miller reports on the other side of lower birth rates.
One of the biggest drivers of the delay in childbearing is widely considered to be a success story: the decline of teen pregnancy, which had been unusually high in the United States. It reached its recent peak in 1991, at 61.8 births per 1,000 girls and women ages 15 to 19, before rapidly declining to 11.7 per 1,000 in 2025. The change is attributed to more effective contraception, education about pregnancy prevention and less sex among teenagers.
Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics (2nd Edition)
