COLUMN: How or will the decline be seen?

Every so often I have cracked the joke the only reason why I had children was so someone could pay into Social Security while I’m in my 50s.

I’ve reached that age. The joke should be taken more seriously seeing our birth rates decline. Who will be new paying into Social Security some 20 years from now?

The Associated Press reported earlier this year, “A little under 3.6 million babies were born in 2023, according to provisional statistics released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s about 76,000 fewer than the year before and the lowest one-year tally since 1979.

U.S. births were slipping for more than a decade before COVID-19 hit, then dropped 4% from 2019 to 2020. They ticked up for two straight years after that, an increase experts attributed, in part, to pregnancies that couples had put off amid the pandemic’s early days.”

The story continued. “The 2023 numbers seem to indicate that bump is over and we’re back to the trends we were in before,” said Nicholas Mark, a University of Wisconsin researcher who studies how social policy and other factors influence health and fertility.

The 3.6 million count averages to a bit less than 10,000 babies a day. That is about 2,000 people more than the population of Creston. The 10,000 averages to 200 per state per day.

The birth rate and access to maternity care was part of the Greater Regional Health board’s September meeting. The emphasis was the few places in Southwest Iowa where a child can be delivered. Creston was one of the very few places south of Interstate 80 and west of Interstate 35, excluding metro Des Moines.

More hospitals, especially the rural ones, have stopped providing the service. There just isn’t enough babies to justify the cost although other factors are involved.

Various surveys of child-bearing people and couples, mainly in their 20s, have said they don’t have an interest in having a child because of the cost of raising a child or culture or world to raise a child. I think those reasons are very subjective. I know of two couples, who are older than I, who also don’t have children.

Cost is always a fascinating topic. Before my wife and I had children we were told by others that we never will be financially prepared to have children. We believed it. A dear friend of mine once told me children are not an expense, they are an investment. We didn’t have any college loans to pay and, at the time, our jobs’ incomes were modest. We were living in a comfortable two-bedroom rented house with our firstborn. We purchased a home a month before our second child arrived. It was a much different economy and housing market 22 years ago.

Maybe it can be a natural reaction to some, but my wife and I, and we know others, who reviewed their budget and knew what things could be sacrificed or cut back for the child’s needs which are new to the budget. Us using childcare was rare. I do wish we would have put more time and effort into those college education savings plans when you have your child.

Then there is the culture we live.

Our first born arrived the week before Sept. 11, 2001. My brother and older sister were born during the intensity of the Vietnam War in the 1960s. My grandmother and some of her siblings were born during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl days - in a region of the country hit by the Dust Bowl.

We live in a fallen world. I had long accepted the reality things will go wrong around the world and sometimes close to home. I can’t imagine thinking having a child and somehow living in proverbial bubble wrap. Previous children and families survived tensions.

I do wonder when, and to what extent, we will see the drop in the birth rate in our daily lives. It may not look the same everywhere, and I don’t expect it to. We’ve seen rural hospitals close maternity wards.

Will struggles with staffing childcare facilities end because there won’t be enough kids to worry about? That transitions into early education. Will the early grades be smaller in class size or have two classrooms of the same grade rather than four? Those numbers will carry on as the enrollment progress through to graduation.

If automation and robots in the future don’t take over all parts of the economy, there may be longer waits for services because there are not enough people to fill the positions that had been established.

Only the future of hospitals’ maternity wards will answer those questions, how many there may be.