Since 1955 the birth rate in the United States has declined from 25.0 per 1,000 population to 16.2 in 1991. An estimated 4,111,000 live births occurred in 1991, which was a decrease of 2% from 1990. Natural increase, which is the excess of births over deaths, added 1,946,000 persons to the population in 1991, a rate of 7.7. The rate for 1990 was 8.1, 5% higher than 1991. A decline in the rate of natural increase is due to a larger decrease in the birth rate than in the death rate. The provisional statistics for the first quarter 1992 indicate there were 999,000 live births, a 2% increase over the same three-month period in 1991. The birth rate declined by 1%, from 15.8 in the first quarter of 1991 to 15.7 in the first quarter of 1992.
The following information was gathered by the National Center for Health Statistics. There are three regions, New England, Mid Atlantic, and East North Central, whose figures exclude those from a state whose figures were not available ("n/a"). All the information is a provisional estimate based on state of residence, rather than state of occurrence.
