US Births 2007 - An Analysis by State and Race

[Ban my account ffs!]

It's interesting that you posted this.  There were several headlines discussing the newest "baby boomlet" because the number of births rose to a record level in 2007, surpassing the previous record set in 1957.

My county has seen a large increase in the number of births in the past 10 years, rising from around 550 in 1995 to 710 in 2007, the highest level since the late '50s.

The schools are predicting a significant rise in elementary school enrollment and they are worried that there isn't enough room.  They already closed schools in 2000 and 2003 when enrollment was dropping, but it has now turned around again.

Now several of the schools are overcrowded with music and art teachers having to wheel carts around so their classrooms can be used for regular classrooms.  At the same time, the high school enrollment has dropped from 1800 when I was in high school to just over 1300 today... in a building built to serve 2400 students.

But that's just it... you can't really predict fertility.  Nobody really knows why the birth rate has increased in the past few years after having dropped for the better part of 40 years.

[Ban my account ffs!]

Births are due to increase in the U.S. thanks to the general demographics.  The baby boomers had children from the late '70s to the early '90s and now the "echo boomers" (our generation) are beginning to have kids, so the number of child bearing young women is on the rise.

In my area, people tend to have kids about a year or two younger than in the rest of the state, so we see these trends earlier.  The number of births peaked and plateaued from the baby boom from 1951-1962 or so before falling rapidly (by about 40%) by 1967 before slowly rising throughout the '70s and then rising rapidly in the late '70s, and plateauing again all through the '80s before falling rapidly in the early '90s... and the process started over... births slowly rose from 1995-2000 but have really begun to boom since about 2004.

Births will continue to rise and stay high here for another 10 years or so before falling again.

From 2000 to 2007 our county grew just under 10%, but the number of births jumped 22%.  During the '90s, population grew 16% but births fell about 10%.