New Hampshire had 11,761 births in 2024, which appears to be the lowest number in recent decades. That’s a full 16% below the number we saw three decades ago, when the state had almost 200,000 fewer people.
As you can see from the above chart, gathered from the state bureau of Vital Records, the bump in births we got after COVID has quickly gone away. We’ve returned to the long trend of a declining number of births.
New Hampshire, of course, is far from alone in this pattern. Many states and developed countries have seen the number of new babies decline over the past two decades as social patterns have changed.
A few countries are starting to see their population decline as their deaths begin to outpace their births. The world’s population as a whole will continue to grow for at least the next generation because the number of women entering child-bearing age is still increasing.
A slowing of population growth is good news for environmental reasons, since it limits the pressure on global ecosystems, but bad news for economic and social reasons since it leaves fewer working adults to support the elderly. As I put in back in 2017, “The baby bust is a disaster; it’s also our only hope.”
The Trump administration is among a number of governments talking about or instituting policies designed to boost the number of births, although such practices have little effect. No country in the world has been able to reverse declining birth rates to any degree.
Looking at CDC data just released, it appears that Vermont saw the fewest births in the country in 2024, barely 5,000 of them. That’s fewer even than Wyoming, the only state with a smaller population.
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