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It makes sense that since the start of the recession, the birth rate in America has been declining.

In 2011, it dipped to the lowest rate ever recorded: 63.2 per 1,000 women between 15 and 44, the prime childbearing ages, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

That plunge was led by immigrant women, according to a Pew Research Center analysis released Thursday.

The birth rate for U.S.-born women declined 6% between 2007 (when the recession began) and 2010. However, the rate for foreign-born women plunged 14%, more than in the 17 years before the downturn.

Both foreign- and U.S.-born Hispanic women had larger drops in birth rate than any other group, Pew found. That correlates with larger percentage declines in household wealth for Hispanics than in white, black or Asian households.

Among women from Mexico, the country from where the largest number of U.S. immigrants come, the birth rate fell by 23%.

"If you apply the common sense lens here, when it comes to decisions about when to have children, how many and how to space them, the economy clearly matters," said Bill Albert, spokesman for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.

Even so, Albert warned that any single reason is unlikely to explain an issue as complex as national fertility rates and as profound and personal as the decision to have children.

He said other factors - including people choosing to get married at a later age and a 48% decrease in teen birth rates since their peak in 1991 - may also be playing a role in the decline of the nation's overall birth rate.

The drop reversed a trend in which immigrant mothers were responsible for a rising share of births in the United States, Pew found. In 2007, for instance, foreign-born mothers accounted for 25% of U.S. births, compared with 16% in 1990. In 2010, that share dropped to 23%.More at http://inamerica.blogs.cnn.com/2012/11/29/immigrants-lead-plunge-in-u-
s-birth-rate/?hpt=hp_bn1

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