The overall number of births in the United States dropped in 2023 as teenage births reached a record low, according to new provisional federal data published early Thursday.
In 2023, there were 3.59 million births recorded, a 2% decline from the 3.66 million recorded in 2022, according to the report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics.
This follows what has been a general decline since the mid-2010s. Between 2015 and 2020, the number of births fell an average of 2% per year from 2015 to 2020, including a decline of 4% from 2019 to 2020.