Here's another terrifying fertility statistic guaranteed to freak you out

There is lots to be scared about regarding fertility and the future of civilization. And there's always something else just waiting to be discovered and to frighten you even further.

And now, right on time, Lyman Stone at the Institute for Family Studies gives us another data point about the fertility crisis that should make everyone's hair stand on end:

Fertility is not just being delayed. Fewer women will ever become moms. It's a genuine decline.

It's true. One persistent talking point throughout the past decade or so has been that we're not seeing a true drop in fertility, just a temporary delay in the number of children that a woman has.

Once the current childbearing cohort gets a little older, the argument goes, they'll start having kids, erasing the ostensible fertility cliff dropoff we've been seeing accelerate since the turn of the century.

But the data don't show that. Indeed, they show that the number of women who ever become mothers is in fact in a rather steep decline — which is to say the number of women who will remain forever childless is growing.

That circled downturn shows an apparent peak of "completed motherhood" occurring right around 2018-2019 or so. After that, the percentage of women who "became mothers by age 45" in the United States began a marked and pronounced decline.

In effect, the data are demonstrating what common sense and wisdom have told us for generations: The longer you wait to have kids, the less likely it is you'll have kids at all.

And as Stone notes, the data are bad across the board for women of all age demographics, meaning the decline isn't being made up anywhere at all. It's a real decline!

Stone wrote a few weeks ago in the New York Times that the data are in fact grimmer than even the grimmest accepted predictions: The Institute for Family Studies "sees the American population beginning to shrink in the 2050s," decades ahead of the generally accepted projections. The problem isn't just bad, it's worse than anyone thinks — and it's getting worse.

Some more explication on the data from the IFS report:

First birth rates among women in their early 30s have been declining since 2007. For women in their late 30s, first birth rates have been falling since 2014. Meanwhile, since 2015, the rate in which childless women became mothers at age 30 has fallen by 33%, while the rate in which childless women became mothers at age 40 has fallen by 13 percent.

If women were merely delaying motherhood, we would expect first birth rates among such women to be rising. Instead, entry into motherhood is falling across nearly every age, with negligible increases among women in their mid-to-late 40s. First births to women in their late 40s remain almost non-existent — fewer than 3 out of every 1,000 childless women become mothers in a given year.

It's a grim forecast, but buckle up — it's only going to get grimmer.