Shanahan Misleads on Women’s Fertility Trends
SciDigest
Women are having fewer children today than in the past globally, but experts say that’s by choice and it doesn’t mean “we are facing a crisis in reproductive health,” as Nicole Shanahan, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate, said during her announcement speech. Infertility rates have remained steady during the last decades.
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Since the 1960s, multiple social and cultural changes have led to a significant decline in the average number of children women have.
The global average fertility rate went from 5 children per woman in 1965 to 2.3 in 2021, according to data from the United Nations World Population Prospects presented by Our World in Data. In the U.S., the fertility rate declined from 2.9 to 1.7 in that same time period. The fertility rate measures the average number of children that would be born per woman over her lifetime based on fertility rates across age groups for one year.
Experts and studies point to a combination of factors to explain why women are choosing to have fewer children, including more access to education and to the labor force, the use of contraception, declining rates of child mortality, and the cost of bringing up children.
“[W]omen’s empowerment,by , a professor of practice in global data analytics at Oxford University and founder and director of Our World in Data.
