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What You Should Know About Pregnancy After 40

Whether you were building your career, searching for the right guy, or just weren’t ready to start a family until now, you’re definitely not alone. The birth rate for women ages 40 to 44 increased by 3 percent from 2008 to 2009, the most recent year for which data is available, which is the highest jump since the late ’60s, according to the CDC.

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CDC: US Birth Rate Falls to Historic Low

The U.S. birth rate has hit a fresh low, and experts say the poor economy is probably the romance-killing culprit responsible for the decline. Fresh numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show the nation’s fertility rate slumped to a record low in 2012, with 63.0 births per 1,000 women of childbearing years. That beat the previous all-time low of 63.2 in 2011.

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More Babies, Please

IN the eternally recurring debates about whether some rival great power will knock the United States off its global perch, there has always been one excellent reason to bet on a second American century: We have more babies than the competition.

It’s a near-universal law that modernity reduces fertility. But compared with the swiftly aging nations of East Asia and Western Europe, the American birthrate has proved consistently resilient, hovering around the level required to keep a population stable or growing over the long run.

America’s demographic edge has a variety of sources: our famous religiosity, our vast interior and wide-open spaces (and the four-bedroom detached houses they make possible), our willingness to welcome immigrants (who tend to have higher birthrates than the native-born).

And it clearly is an edge. Today’s babies are tomorrow’s taxpayers and workers and entrepreneurs, and relatively youthful populations speed economic growth and keep spending commitments affordable. Thanks to our relative demographic dynamism, the America of 50 years hence may not only have more workers per retiree than countries like Japan and Germany, but also have more than emerging powers like China and Brazil. Read full article.