More than a quarter million fewer babies were born in the U.S. in 2022 than in 2012, according to the most recent finalized data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A phenomenon across much of the world, the falling birth rate has sweeping implications on the global economy, prompting Taiwan to spend more than $3 billion on child-rearing initiatives and leaders in several countries to create so-called baby bonuses.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom highlighted declining fertility rates as a structural risk in his 2022-23 budget, saying they could have “both significant societal and labor force repercussions for the coming years.”

A recent Pew study of adults who said they weren’t likely to have children found that a majority of respondents gave a straightforward reason — they “just don’t want to.”

But of those who cited a specific factor, financial reasons was one of the most popular answers. Age and medical reasons were the top reasons. Among parents younger than 40 who said they didn’t plan to have any more children, more than a quarter of respondents cited financial concerns.

And it is more expensive than ever to raise a child in the U.S.

It now costs$310,605, on average, to raise them from birth to 17, based on a Brookings Institution analysis that took U.S. Department of Agriculture data from a few years earlier and accounted for inflation for a middle-class family. (That figure doesn’t include what parents spend on college and helping a child settle into adulthood.)

Birthrates tend to shift along class lines. A recent CDC report found that Americans with lower levels of education — often a proxy for earning less — were more likely to have more children than those with higher levels of education. Wealthier Americans, the data show, were also more likely to have their first child later in life.

For millennials such as Quinn and Coelho-Kostolny, a generation saddled with astronomical student debt, and Gen Z-ers, who entered adulthood to a sky-high housing market, discussions about finances seem to come up far more often and directly in conversations about whether to have children than they did among earlier generations, said Amy Blackstone, a sociology professor at the University of Maine, who has studied the topic for more than decade.

“I hear that louder and clearer now,” said Blackstone, who wrote a book called “Childfree by Choice.”

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