Before Jill Pellerin got pregnant in January, she and her husband talked seriously about whether they should delay having a baby. After five years of marriage, they were eager to start a family, but the steady drumbeat of troubling economic news alarmed them.
“We thought when we bought our house in September 2007 that prices were the lowest they would go,” said Pellerin, 30, a high school teacher who lives with her husband, Brian, a 32-year-old U.S. Geological Survey research scientist. Their son, Benjamin Joseph, is due in October.
“When everything went down a little more and then a little more, we considered holding off on the baby. And when the state put a stop-work order on my husband’s big project, we got a little more concerned.
“We’re nervous because this is our first baby, and we’re nervous because of the economy.”
So are a lot of other people so much so that in the past year, the baby boomlet has gone bust.
The number of births in the six-county Sacramento region declined for the first time in a dozen years, falling from 33,410 during 2007 to 32,639 during 2008, California Department of Public Health figures show. All six counties except Yolo saw a decrease in births, with Sacramento and Yuba leading the way.
As the recession began to take its toll last year, the birthrate fell by a similar amount statewide and across the nation, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
And the decrease is likely to be more pronounced during 2009. A limited review of statewide hospital data shows births plummeting during the first six months of the year.
“It seems to be a common theme I’m hearing from people: ‘We can’t afford to have more kids with the economy the way it is, so we’ll have to wait,’ ” said Lincoln mommy blogger Christine Young, who hears from women across the country on her site.
Over time, birthrates which typically fall during economic downturns, including, most notably, the Depression have proved to be a reliable indicator of the country’s economic mood: Decreased childbearing amounts to a lack of confidence in the future.
Locally, the trend is most pronounced in the young, with births to teen mothers declining by 9 percent and those to women in their 20s by more than 3 percent. The drop grows smaller as mothers get older. Among women past age 35, there was even a slight increase.
“I’ve seen women delaying pregnancy because their husband’s lost his job,” said Dr. William Gilbert, Sutter Health’s regional director for women’s services.
His high-risk pregnancy practice is thriving, he said in part because patients who have lost their private health benefits after being laid off can turn to Medi-Cal’s guaranteed prenatal coverage instead.
But business is down at the Northern California Fertility Medical Center in Roseville, where treatments can cost from $1,000 to $10,000 a month, said Dr. John Gililland.
The decline, he said, is related both to increased competition from other clinics and the one-two economic punch of potential patients’ lost income and inability to borrow against their mortgages in a down housing market.
“It takes a whole lot to quell the desire to have children,” he said. “It’s not the same as a decision whether to buy a new car or TV.”
As Gilbert points out, half of all California pregnancies are unplanned. So it’s not a stretch to assume that economic anxiety has strained relationships and served to extinguish many, many sparks.
The local baby bust crosses Sacramento’s racial lines. The number of births to Asian Americans increased slightly, but whites, African Americans and Latinos all gave birth to fewer children last year.
Jacqueline Carrigan, a sociology professor at California State University, Sacramento, and associate director of the Institute for Social Research, was not surprised to learn that some of the region’s wealthier areas have seen the largest drops in births.
“It’s a psychological issue, about feeling secure,” she said. “They’ve seen their 401(k)s drop. And the financial crisis is going to have a stronger impact on the upper middle class. They might be a little more careful about reproductive choices because they have been harmed.”
If the lowered birthrate proves to be a lasting trend, she said, this baby bust generation may enjoy the advantage of less competition for schools and jobs in a few decades while shouldering a larger financial burden for taking care of the generations before them.
Downsizing cost Ross Villegas his Internet marketing job last November, just as he and his wife, Annemarie, 31, were deciding it was time to have a baby. But by the beginning of January, Villegas had found another job as an account manager for 3Fold Communications and now Annemarie is 18 weeks pregnant.
“Getting laid off put a damper on our plans a little,” said Villegas, 34, who lives in the Arden area.
“But she’s wanting to settle down and have a family. We know we’ll have to scrimp and save anyway, having children. The economy doesn’t dictate that too much
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