U.S. Births Slip Below 4 Million

America’s births fell below 4 million last year for the first time this decade as more daughters of baby boomers joined their mothers beyond the prime childbearing years. At the same time, deaths hit a record high.

Both trends represent natural changes as the nation’s population ages, according to the Census Bureau’s 1995 Population Profile of the United States, released Monday.

But that doesn’t mean the population is in any danger of shrinking. “We still have about 1.7 million more births than deaths, and we will for quite some time,” explained Carl Haub, a demographer at the private Population Reference Bureau.

The major factor in the decline in births is that there are fewer women of the main childbearing ages of 15-to-29, the census report said.

The 3,949,000 births estimated for 1994 was 2.2 percent fewer than the year before and marked the first time since 1988 that the number had been below 4 million.