In the past two decades, Mountain West states have seen the sharpest declines in the rates that women are having babies.
Fertility rates are declining nationwide as families decide to have children later or not at all. But Utah, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Idaho and Wyoming all ranked in the top ten for drops between 2005 and 2023, according to a recent Lending Tree analysis of federal data.
Credit: Lending Tree, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Note: The fertility rate is births per 1,000 women between 15 and 44.
In 2005 in Utah, for every thousand women of childbearing age, about 92.8 babies were born. By 2023, that number had dropped to 59.6, the sharpest decline in the country.
That’s partly because the fertility rate there and in other Western states was so high they had more room to fall, compared to states in the South, which already had lower rates.
Emily Harris, a demographer at University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, has documented this trend. She said another factor is that as people flock to desirable locations in the West, home prices have skyrocketed. Studies show the rising cost of living can delay or prevent families from having kids.
“A lot of people have in their mind that you buy a house and then you have a kid,” she said. “With people having to spend more money on buying a house, if they're able to, that can impact their decisions on childbearing.”
Harris said the 2008 recession also has been linked to fertility rate declines nationwide, meaning fewer workers are coming of age now. In Utah, she said people moving to the state are offsetting impacts on the economy.
But in more rural states like Wyoming, not as much. There, fewer births could be the result of another factor.
“Wyoming's population change is always driven by employment change,” said Wenlin Liu, Wyoming’s chief economist. “And Wyoming's employment trend is always driven by the mining industry.”
Liu said the energy downturn between 2015 and 2017 is in part responsible for fewer babies in the state, since the young people who would be having children left the state for more opportunities elsewhere.
He added that the state’s economy is becoming less reliant on the mining industry with the rise of remote work, though the population is still quickly aging, raising questions about the future of the workforce.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump has deemed himself the “fertilization president” and is considering ways to get people to have more babies, like expanding IVF.
The One Big Beautiful Bill also just made it so U.S. citizens born from this year through the end of 2028 will get an investment account with $1,000. At the same time, it made cuts to Medicaid, which helps cover about 40% of births in the U.S., along with SNAP and other food aid for families.
Harris said fertility is a slow moving process, and it’ll take a long time to see the “fruits of that labor” on those rates.
“ It takes 18 years for a birth to turn into an individual that could move into the job market or start paying taxes,” she said.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Colorado and KANW in New Mexico, with support from affiliate stations across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by CPB.
