Art Woolf

Free Press contributor

In 2015 Vermont mothers gave birth to 5,903 babies, fewer than any year of this century, the 20th century, and probably fewer than any year since the middle of the 19th century, when Vermont’s population was half of what it is today.

The number Vermont births has been on a steady decline for the past 15 years, a major factor contributing to Vermont’s population stagnation and to the declining number of students in our schools. In the early 1980s, at the start of what’s now called the Millennial Generation, 8,000 babies were born. That represented a sharp increase from the mid and late 1970s, when births averaged about 7,000 per year. That sharp rise in the number of births was also occurring nationally. Surprisingly, Vermont’s births increased at a faster rate than the nation as a whole.

But that didn’t last long. Less than a decade later, that sharp increase was over and births dropped precipitously, falling from 8,500 in 1989 to 6,800 in 1995. The number of births leveled off for a decade but then in 2007 it again began to decline.

This time, Vermont’s experience was not the same as the U.S. experience. The Millennial Generation, with its large number of births, is dated from the early 1980s through about 2000. And the high number of births continued after 2000, peaking in 2007. Births in the U.S. remained high and increased to 2007. But in Vermont the largest millennial birth year was 1989, 18 years before U.S. births peaked. And in the years since Vermont’s 1989 peak, the number of births has fallen precipitously while nationally there has been only a modest decline in birth since the 2007 peak.

Looking at it another way, more babies were born in 2007 in the U.S. than in any year in history except for 1957, the peak post-war baby boom birth year. And the number of births in the U.S. hasn’t fallen by much since then. That’s hardly the case for Vermont. In fact, it’s nearly the opposite. Last year was the lowest number of births in Vermont since before the Civil War. We don’t have statistics for every year in the 1800s, but we know that there were 6,500 births in 1857 and 6,400 in 1880 — both higher numbers than the 5,903 births in 2015. And remember that Vermont’s population today is nearly twice what it was before the Civil War.

Although the Centers for Disease Control, the federal agency that counts births, has not yet published their numbers, by my estimate Vermont had the lowest fertility rate in the nation in 2015, with 50.8 births per 1,000 women age 15-44. For the nation as a whole, the fertility rate was 62.5 — the lowest it has ever been, but still significantly higher than Vermont’s.

Why is Vermont’s fertility rate so low? It’s hard to come up with a good reason. Maybe people just don’t enjoy making babies as much as used to, but I doubt that. It appears to be something in common with other states in the Northeast: All six New England states have the lowest rates in the nation, and add in Pennsylvania and New York and you get eight out of the bottom nine states (Oregon is the other). So geography plays a role, but probably in an indirect way. There’s nothing about the Northeast per se (colder winters, proximity to Canada and the North Atlantic Ocean) that would lead to low fertility rates. Instead there are some characteristics of people in the states in our region that causes them to have low birth rates.

I don’t have any good explanations for what those reasons are, but whatever they are, Vermont’s low fertility rate appears to be here to stay. With women having fewer babies, our population won’t grow unless more people move into the state. And that’s not happening either.

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Art Woolf is associate professor of economics at the University of Vermont.