The State Where People Had the Fewest Kids in 2020

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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The State Where People Had the Fewest Kids in 2020

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The birth rates of several of the world’s largest nations have started to drop. Japan is one case in point. The size of its entire population may actually start to fall in the coming decades. Its current birth rate is only 1.4. Even China has a problem. The world’s largest nation by population is home to over 1.3 billion people. It had a “one child per couple” policy because its population was growing so fast–until recently. The is up to a “three child policy” now that the rate of births has slowed. China faces an aging population and will have to support more seniors in retirement. The huge number of people it needs for factory work is also at risk.

An aging population causes other difficulties. National medical costs rise as people reach their 70s, 80s, and 90s. More and more people have heart disease, cancer, and dementia. The uptick in the financial burden this causes will be shouldered in many nations, which includes the U.S. Some experts believe the American trend for smaller families, which has increased in the last several decades will not change, although the end of the COVID-19 pandemic might alter that as people who put off children start to have them.

To identify the states where the most children were born in 2020, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed provisional data on the total number of births, by state of residence, from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics’ Vital Statistics Rapid Release in May 2021.

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With COVID-19 vaccines being distributed across the country and pandemic death rates dropping, some experts have speculated that the birth rate will rise in 2021, as couples who put off pregnancies now being willing to move forward.

The state with the fewest children born last year is Michigan where the total number of births per 100,000 people in 2020 was 38.5. Births last year were only 3,846. Its population in 2020 was 10,077,331.

Click here to see which states had the highest birth rates in 2020.
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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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