Births to 40-year-olds are less common but a greater share than in 1960

Never before have such a high proportion of all births been to women over 40 — they are now 2.8% of all births in the US. And yet a 40-year-old woman today is one-third less likely to have a baby than she was in 1947.

From 1960 to 1980, birth rates to women over 40* fell, as the Baby Boom ended and people were having fewer children by stopping earlier. Since 1980 birth rates to women over 40 have almost tripled as people started “starting” their families at later ages, but they’re still lower than they were back when total fertility was much higher.

Sources: Birth rates 1940-1969, 1970-2010, 2011, 2012-2013, 2014-2015; 2016; Percent of births 1960-1980, 1980-2008.

Put another way, a child born to a mother over 40 before 1965 was very likely the youngest of several (or many) siblings. Today they are probably the youngest of 2 or an only child. A crude way to show this is to use the Current Population Survey to look at how many children are present in the households of women ages 40-49 who have a child age 0 (the survey doesn’t record births as events, but the presence of a child age 0 is pretty close). Here is that trend:

In the 1970s about 60 percent of children age 0 had three or more siblings present, and only 1 in 20 was an only child. Now more than a quarter are the only child present and another 30 percent only have one sibling present. (Note this doesn’t show however many siblings no longer live in the household, and I don’t know how that might have changed over the years).

This updates an old post that focused on the health consequences of births to older parents. The point from that post remains: there are fewer children (per woman) being born to 40-plus mothers today than there were in the past, it just looks like there are more because they’re a larger share of all children.

* Note in demography terms, “over 40” means older than “exact age” 40, so it includes people from the moment they turn 40.