U.S. Live Births Shift by Race and Ethnicity from 2016 to 2024
A JAMA Network Open research letter reports that annual U.S. live births fell 8.4% from 2016–2024 and that the racial/ethnic distribution of births shifted over the same period, based on national data covering more than 33 million live births.
The analysis used national live birth data from 2016–2024 (more than 33 million births) to evaluate both annual birth counts and each year’s proportional share of births by race/ethnicity. Here, proportional share is the fraction of all live births in a given year attributed to a specific racial/ethnic group, independent of that year’s total volume. Linear trends were summarized with slopes in percentage points per year and accompanying R² values describing how closely a straight-line model fit the year-to-year pattern. Presenting both volume and proportional share helps distinguish whether observed changes reflect a shifting denominator, redistribution across groups, or both—an important distinction for service mix and equity surveillance.
Across the study interval, annual U.S. live births declined 8.4%, describing the observed trajectory without specifying underlying causes. Clinically, fewer births change the baseline scale of obstetric activity that many downstream ratios, benchmarks, and staffing assumptions implicitly rely on. Birth volume also serves as a practical denominator for interpreting changes in subgroup case counts. Keeping that denominator explicit makes it easier to separate absolute changes from compositional shifts.
Within that overall decline, the proportional share of births to non-Hispanic White individuals fell from 52.6% in 2016 to 49.6% in 2024, putting the group below half of births by the end of the period. Because proportional-share changes can occur alongside either falling or rising absolute numbers, the finding is most informative when interpreted alongside the concurrent decline in total births. The takeaway for clinicians and health systems is that measurable redistribution can occur even when the overall trajectory moves in a single direction.
Hispanic births (any race) increased in proportional share from 23.5% to 27.4% and were described as the only major population group that increased in both absolute number and proportional share during 2016–2024. Trend statistics for Hispanic births showed a positive slope of 0.5 percentage points per year with an R² of 0.87, consistent with a strong linear rise over time. In contrast, proportional-share declines were reported for non-Hispanic Black births (14.3% to 13.2%; slope −0.2 percentage points per year; R² 0.55) and non-Hispanic Asian births (6.5% to 6.3%; slope −0.1 percentage points per year; R² 0.45). In this framing, slopes reflect average annual direction and magnitude of change in proportional share, while R² reflects how well a linear model captures the observed pattern.
The authors also linked the demographic transition to maternal health planning needs, emphasizing improved capacity to deliver bilingual, culturally sensitive care to help prevent disparities from worsening. They described the inequity context explicitly: Hispanic and Black pregnant women were identified as experiencing the highest rates of maternal illness and death in the United States and accounting for “over 40%,” as stated. This places the compositional shifts alongside existing risk and access concerns rather than treating them as purely demographic.