In the past two decades, Wyoming and other Mountain West states have seen the steepest drops in fertility rates nationwide.
Women in Wyoming, for instance, are having about 25% fewer babies. In Utah, they’re having more than 35% less.
Wyoming Public Media News Director Kamila Kudelska recently spoke with Reporter Hanna Merzbach who has been following this trend.
Editor’s Note: This interview was lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Kamila Kudelska: What exactly is a fertility rate and why are we using that word instead of birth rate?
Hanna Merzbach: So fertility rate is the number of babies being born to a thousand women of childbearing age, so between 15 and 44 years old. Birth rate, on the other hand, is the number of births divided by the total population, so it's just a lot less specific. Researchers really like to use fertility rates because it shows how many children women of a certain age in a population are having per year.
KK: Got it. And what have the trends been here?
HM: Between 2005 and 2023, this 18-year spread, Wyoming saw the 10th biggest drop in fertility rates nationwide. That's from a Lending Tree analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data that I verified. So, in Wyoming we saw a drop from 71 babies per 1,000 women of childbearing age, to just 55 a year.
Plus, across the Mountain West, we saw even bigger drops. Utah was number one nationwide. They went from 93 babies per 1,000 women of childbearing age, to 60.
KK: Why are fertility rates dropping so much in this region?
HM: So, a couple reasons. First off, fertility rates were already pretty high in this region, so they just had further to fall during that time period.
Another reason is economic conditions. Fertility rates across the country largely fell after the 2008 recession. Specifically in the West, we've seen rapid population growth in the last couple years, and so this has brought a slew of affordability issues and a housing crisis. Before this interview, I talked to University of Utah demographer Emily Harris about how that can impact fertility rates. Here’s what she had to say.
“A lot of people have in their mind that you buy a house and then you have a kid. With people having to spend more money on buying a house if they're able to, that can impact their decisions on childbearing.” - Emily Harris, demographer at University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute
HM: She also said there's been generational shifts around how people think about having children. So they're waiting until later in life, and there's just more women in the labor force choosing to not have children.
“Wyoming's population change is always driven by employment change, and Wyoming's employment trend is always driven by the mining industry.” - Wenlin Liu, chief economist at the Wyoming Economic Analysis Division
“Wyoming's population change is always driven by employment change, and Wyoming's employment trend is always driven by the mining industry.” - Wenlin Liu, chief economist at the Wyoming Economic Analysis Division
KK: Do you know any more about what's specifically happening in Wyoming?
HM: Harris actually had a pretty good answer to that more generally.
“There's more talk about the state of the world. There's more talk about environmental concerns. I mean the economic reality of having a child, it's very expensive. Childcare is really expensive.”
HM: In Wyoming specifically, we have a shortage of providers. We also just have a shortage of people to deliver babies, and care for other women’s health needs. About one in five counties in Wyoming are maternity care deserts, according to March of Dimes, an organization that tracks this.
We also know young people are just leaving Wyoming for better opportunities. We have a lot of brain drain here. We just don't have that many people to have babies. I talked to Wyoming state economist Wenlin Liu about this. He pointed to another factor.
“Wyoming's population change is always driven by employment change, and Wyoming's employment trend is always driven by the mining industry.” - Wenlin Liu, chief economist at the Wyoming Economic Analysis Division
HM: He said, specifically between 2015 and 2017, the oil and gas industry was down, so more young people left this state or just didn't come here in the first place.
KK: And I know Wyoming has a rapidly aging population. Does that factor into all of this?
HM: Yeah, we have a lot of baby boomers here, and Liu actually told me that's partly because back in the ’70s and early ’80s, Wyoming had a huge oil boom. So that's when a lot of these people came.
But he also said this is changing. He said our economy is becoming less dependent on the energy industry. We have more remote workers nowadays, after the Covid-19 pandemic. More people are coming here for rural lifestyles and the outdoors.
Liu said this could help, but there's still a need to diversify our economy a lot more, which the state of Wyoming is working on. We're investing more in tech industries, nuclear energy, recreation and tourism. However, Liu also said if we continue to have low fertility rates, we just need more people to move from other states. But we're competing with all the other states that also need workers. This is a constant moving target.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio (KNPR) in Las Vegas, 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 the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
