Bad economy equals fewer births

After a record high number of babies being born to American mothers in 2007, the following year marked the beginning of a steep decline in birth rates. This coincides with a similar decline in per-capita income in the United States that also began in 2008, according to a recent analysis by the Pew Research Center.

Hispanics, the report noted, “were particularly hard hit by the Great Recession [and] have experienced the largest fertility declines of the nation’s three major racial and ethnic groups.”

Historically, it has been shown that economic downturns coincide with birth-rate declines—the Great Depression and and the early-1970s oil bust were given as examples in the Pew report.