Talk about pregnancy and fertility often centers on how old a woman is when she begins having children and how many she intends to have. There’s less discussion on the other end of the female reproductive cycle: the age at which a woman has her last child.
Researchers at Bowling Green State University in Ohio decided to take a close look at that, given the falling fertility rate in the United States and much of the rest of the world, which has ramifications beyond an immediate household.
The beginning and the ending of having children are tied together in ways that shape the future economy, a woman’s ability to have the number of children she wants, the coming workforce and even whether neighborhoods build or shutters schools. Questions of maturity and resources not all financial come into play. And this particular landscape has been changing for many years.
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Furthermore, new data from December 2020 shows Iowa and Oregon saw similar declines – 4.2% and 6.4%, respectively – from the same month one year earlier. Those drops are in-line with the recently-updated December numbers for Florida (down 6.8%), Arizona (down 4.5%), and Ohio (down 6.0%).
“We are just beginning to see the effects of the pandemic on births and that they are this sizeable already suggests American individuals and families were worried enough about what the pandemic meant - medically, socially, and economically - that they altered their plans to have children,” said Dr. Karen Benjamin Guzzo, a sociologist at Bowling Green State University and the acting director of the school’s Center for Family and Demographic Research. “People don t have children when they are worried about the future and don t feel as if they can afford to raise a child.”
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