Fertility rates show consistent decline
BY VÍCTOR MANUEL RAMOS.
STAFF WRITER
Tribune Newspapers; Orlando Sentinel (c), Jan. 19, 2005
Ever since Ya’Frica Tadesse finished college four years ago, the subtle hints and questions at family gatherings have become more persistent.
Her mom, who had her first child at 22 and whose mother started a family at 15, has been telling Tadesse that she is ready to become a grandmother. Soon.
“By now, according to mom, I should have had kids,” said Tadesse, 27.
But career came first for Tadesse. And she’s not alone. More and more black women like her are waiting longer to have children, one of the reasons that the fertility rate has plummeted among blacks since the past decade.
Fertility rates have declined for American women of all races, but an analysis of birth and fertility data shows that the downward trend has been more noticeable and consistent for black women than for any other racial or ethnic group.
Though the number of births among all women diminished by 3 percent from 1990 to 2002, the decrease in births was 13 percent for black women.
There were 83,366 fewer black babies born in 2002 than in 1990 — and preliminary figures for 2003 show the trend continuing even as whites, Hispanics and Asians had more births from the year before.
The dive in the fertility rate — a measure of the number of births for every 1,000 women between the childbearing ages of 15 and 44 — was even more dramatic, with a 24 percent decline for black women during the same period.
DECLINE ALSO IN FLORIDA
The national trend is also true in Florida, according to more than a decade of birth records tallied yearly by the National Center for Health Statistics in Hyattsville, Md.
The number of black babies born each year in Florida has remained at around 45,000, while the population of women has grown.
That means that a higher percentage of the state’s black women are having fewer babies or not giving birth at all. On average, a black woman in Florida is now projected to have two children in her lifetime, down from three in 1990.
If that pace continues, demographers say, the black population would be barely replacing itself in Florida and nationally over the long term.
“As of 2002 they are roughly at replacement level,” said Paul Sutton, the National Center for Health Statistics demographer who authored the most recent long-term report on the birth and fertility rates of racial and ethnic groups.
Though the numbers show a definitive trend, the reasons for the decline are not easily explained. Experts say many factors have contributed to black women’s movement away from larger families, paramount among them a desire for economic betterment.
One factor is that fewer black teenagers are having babies. The largest decline in births, which was documented through the tallying of official birth records, has taken place among black teenagers.
On average, the number of children born to black teenage girls decreased 41 percent nationally from 1990 to 2002.
“The reduction in teen pregnancies is a big factor, because in black women a lot of the childbearing took place in the younger ages,” said demographer Stephanie Ventura, chief of the reproductive-statistics branch at the National Center for Health Statistics. “The major decline among them has outpaced all other groups. It’s really quite striking.”
STAYING FOCUSED ON SCHOOL
Shavonda Proctor, a 15-year-old freshman at Evans High School in west Orange County, Fla., who dreams of being an actress, said attending pregnancy-prevention courses and hearing from other single moms strengthened her desire to stay focused on school.
“If you end up pregnant, it’s not a good thing, because you have a lot of stuff ahead of your life that you lose,” Proctor said.
Wilhelmina Leigh, a senior research associate with the Health Policy Institute of the Washington, D.C.-based Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, has been researching the cost of teen pregnancies, particularly among blacks. Leigh thinks many factors have contributed to the decline in teen pregnancies.
Birth control in convenient forms — such as shots, the pill or the patch — is much more available, Leigh said. And prevention programs, such as the one at Evans, as well as welfare reform and the boom of the 1990s, she said, helped reduce teen pregnancies. Leigh thinks many teens became focused on their future after seeing more job and advancement opportunities.
It all has signaled a shift in the attitudes of young black women, Leigh said.
“It means that the babies who are born are really wanted, and they are probably being born into situations where they are being cared for and nurtured,” Leigh said. “In that sense, it is probably a good trend.”
But the change in black fertility rates is not only because of the decline in teen pregnancies. The rates dropped for black women in their 20s and early 30s, who typically comprise the largest segment of new mothers. In fact, the only slight rise in black fertility here and elsewhere has been recorded after age 35 and all the way to the mid-40s.
ECONOMIC BETTERMENT
Patrick Mason, an economics professor who directs the African American Studies program at Florida State University, learned from his fertility research that black women are postponing motherhood in pursuit of economic improvement.
More black women than men attend college, Mason said. So not only are black women, married or unmarried, avoiding having children to stay on course, but some of the younger women struggle to find men who meet their expectations, Mason said.
Mason studied statistics from the 1990s for unmarried 25-year-olds whose earnings put them above the poverty level for a family of four. He found that there were about 300 single black men living above the poverty level for every 1,000 black women in the same category.
“If you think of marriage as mainly an economic event, you can see what’s going on,” Mason adds. “What it means to be a husband is to be a breadwinner. So, if you are not making enough to be a breadwinner, you are not marriage-eligible in the minds of women as well as men.”
Ya’Frica Tadesse — whose first name is pronounced YAH-fri-ca, similarly to the name of the continent of Africa — and her friends share the sentiment. She meets weekly with three sorority sisters to discuss their experiences and drink cappuccinos — a ritual they’ve embraced after graduating from the University of Central Florida.
Recently they spoke about how their single lives can be a stigma in family circles, where strong women have traditionally been motherly figures.
“Why should we, why should I, settle for less?” asks Stephanie Franklin, 31, one of Tadesse’s friends who is a copy editor at the Hometown News in Fort Pierce, Fla. “A lot of family members think that something must be wrong. They have actually asked me if I’m lesbian because it’s almost as if people want for you to bring a husband and have a bunch of kids.”
“Not having children now is a change we wanted to make,” said Suzanne McPherson, 27, an elementary-school teacher who lives in Casselberry, Fla.
‘ZERO KIDS’ FOR NOW
Rosilyn Williams’ mother, for example, was in her teens when she started her family. She had four children. Her maternal grandmother had 10 children. Williams’ twin sister has four. Williams, a radiology technologist who is 25, says she has “zero kids” and plans to keep it that way for now.
“If we’re going to be dominant figures, why not be dominant professionally?” Williams said.
Tadesse relays that message of caution to others as manager for youth education and prevention at the Metropolitan Orlando Urban League, a social-service organization that sponsors a pregnancy-prevention program with schools. She says young women struggle with the contradictory message of excelling without becoming lonely women.
“For me that was kind of the plan,” Tadesse said. “You graduate from high school, you graduate from college; then you think about a family. My parents told me that, and now it’s like, ‘The waiting is over. Can you really get started now?’ “