U.S. hit by baby boom

Washington, March 20: The United States added a record number of newborns in 2007 to the ever expanding population. As per a report released by federal researchers, the baby boom record set 50 years earlier was broken in 2007.

The same trend was also observed in the local hospitals by the researchers.

On an average, 600 babies are delivered in Hilton Head Hospital every year. 2007 saw these figures plummet to 704 babies. This upward trend continued in 2008 with 738 deliveries.

A spokeswoman for the Beaufort Memorial Hospital said that 2,123 babies were delivered in 2006. This broke all the previous birth records of the hospital.

However, there was a decline in the number of births in 2007. 1,971 babies were born in this year.

The researchers have pointed out the positive and negative aspects of the so called “Baby Boom” seen in 2007. The good news is that the U.S. population is more than replacing itself. A U.S. woman bears 2.1 children on an average in her lifetime. This is exactly the number required for a population to replace itself.

But the negative aspect is that the teen birth rates had increased for the second consecutive year.

The figures obtained for the year 2007 are based on the analysis of many 2007 birth certificates that was conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics.

Experts are not sure as to how long this development will continue, but they do believe that the birth rates are already decreasing due to the economic recession.

Dr. Carol Hogue, an Emory University Professor of maternal and child health, was quoted as saying, “The lowest birth rates recorded in the United States occurred during the Great Depressiondefine -- and that was before modern contraception.”

There have been many collaborative efforts in order to reduce teen pregnancy. The figures did go down in the 1990s but the latest data shows an upsurge in the same again.

If we go into history, the “Baby Boom” was seen in Canada from 1947 to 1966 and in Australia from 1946 to 1961. This was the time during the Second World War when young males came back to the United States, Canada and Australia after their overseas tours. They started their families, which significantly increased the number of children in the world.

Statistics show that from 1930s to the early 1940s, the number of newborns in the United States ranged from 2.3 to 2.8 million on an average annually. This number stood at 2.8 million births in the year 1945 and thus signified the beginning of the Baby Boom. The number of newborns in the United States drastically went up to 3.47 million in 1946.