More Women Are Mothers

A baby bust. The fertility rate at a record low. Millennials deciding not to have children. There has been a lot of worry about the state of American fertility.

Yet today, 86 percent of women ages 40 to 44 — near the end of their reproductive years — are mothers, up from 80 percent in 2006, reversing decades of declines, according to a new analysis of census data by Pew Research Center on Thursday.

The increase has been especially steep among groups of women who hadn’t been having as many babies: those with advanced degrees, and those who never marry. Today, 55 percent of never-married women ages 40 to 44 have at least one child, up from 31 percent two decades ago, Pew found.

The share of women who have children could drop again if current trends continue. Women are planning to have children at later ages, when they are more likely to have trouble conceiving. And the fertility rate has not rebounded after the recession in the way that many economists expected: The number of babies born per 1,000 women of childbearing age in 2016, the last year for which we have official data, was a record low.

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The U.S. Fertility Rate Is Down, Yet More Women Are Mothers

The biggest increases have come from some groups who in the past were far less likely to have babies: highly educated women, those over 40, and women who have never been married.

By Claire Cain Miller Jan. 18, 2018