One of the biggest changes is that — and essentially fell off a cliff in the past decade.

“They said it would never happen here,” said Pam Perlich, senior demographer at the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute. “No one who knew the old Utah ever expected this to happen — or so quickly.”

The 2018 total fertility rate for Utah — the number of children each woman here would expect to have in her lifetime — has now dropped to 2.03, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. The rate to exactly replace the population over time is 2.1

The new rate is less than half of Utah’s fertility rate of 4.3 back in 1960. It also comes after 11 straight years of decreases since the rate was 2.68 in 2007.