The teenage birth rate in the U.S. fell by 7% in 2025, continuing decades of decline, according to a report published Thursday by the National Center for Health Statistics.
"A 7% decline is really quite extraordinary," says the report's lead author, Brady Hamilton, a statistician demographer with the center, which is part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Overall, nearly 126,000 babies were born to mothers ages 15 to 19, according to the analysis of provisional data. The birth rate for that age group was 11.7 births per 1,000 females. By contrast, the teen birth rate in 1991 was 61.8 births per 1,000.
The report also explored other topics related to births in the United States. The overall birth rate fell 1% from the previous year, also continuing a long decline. The rate of preterm births was unchanged. And the cesarean delivery rate increased to 32.5% in 2025, which is the highest rate since 2013, continuing a slight upward trend.
Notably, the provisional report does not include an analysis of births by the mother's race or ethnicity, even though those were included in this report in the last few years. CDC told NPR in a statement that this year's report is "covering fewer topics than previous provisional birth reports," but also that race data is still available on CDC's WONDER online database.
This provisional report comes out every year in the spring based on more than 99% of registered births for the previous year. "It gives us basically a sneak peek at some key factors that we can expect when we get the final data for that year," Hamilton says. The final data is usually published in August.
The harder "why" question
While birth certificates provide a great deal of demographic, geographic and other kinds of detail about a birth, "the birth certificate does not allow us to address the question of why," Hamilton says.
Many factors are driving the 35-year decline in teen birth rates, says Bianca Allison, pediatrician and associate professor at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine.
"What is actually affecting the birth rates are likely lower rates of teen pregnancy overall, which is in the context of higher use of contraception and lower sexual activity for youth, and then also continued access to abortion care," she says.
While there has been a lot of concern about the declining general birth rate in the U.S., the decline in teen births is harder to parse as a good or bad news story.
"I think it depends on who you're talking to and how they're positioned and looking at the data," says Allison, a fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health, an advocacy group that favors abortion rights and supports health equity. "From my perspective, as somebody who specifically studies the provision of high-quality reproductive health care and access for young people, this should be celebrated as long as this is aligned with what people are actually wanting for themselves."
She adds that there are a lot of negative narratives associated with teen parenthood in terms of educational and career potential. "Many of those outcomes are due to the lack of societal, institutional and systemic supports that young people receive to parent, not their lack of ability to parent," she argues.
She hopes that the declining teen birth rate doesn't make people think this issue is gone. "We cannot get our foot off the gas pedal of continuing to invest in supports" for teen parents to help them reach their goals. They need educational, social and medical help to thrive, she says: "All those things are incredibly important."
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