Fertility Figures (The Wall Street Journal)
Visiting Fellow John May is quoted in an article on fertility rates by The Wall Street Journal.
The general fertility rate, or births per 1,000 women age 15 to 44, indicates U.S. fertility is at record-low levels. The total fertility rate, an estimate of how many children the average woman who lives through all her child-bearing years will have in her lifetime, puts current fertility rates well above record-low levels in the 1970s.
The first can be skewed by unusual distributions of the female population among the ages 15 to 44. The second is hampered by its synthetic nature: It is based on the assumption that today’s age-specific fertility rates will carry forward into the future. Both, demographers say, are preferable to the crude birth rate, or per-capita births, which can be skewed by unusual gender ratios or an atypically old or young population.
“The crude birth rates might be distorted because of the age structure,” said John F. May, a demographer and visiting fellow at the Center for Global Development, a think tank in Washington, D.C.
