Snip

The really sad events around the Discovery Channel hostage situation, and the subsequent death of James Lee, made me wonder a little bit about total fertility rates. Lee seems to have had sentiments very similar to some of the anti-humanists within the Deep Ecology movement. Unlike the mainstream Left these elements of Deep Ecology are greatly concerned about the high fertility rates of non-developed societies and of the immigrants from those societies in a proximate sense (that is, the fertility is of a concern foremost because of the direct immediate environmental footprint, rather than a symptom of broader societal underdevelopment). I’ve probed the international differences in total fertility rates before, but what about in the United States? You probably won’t be surprised which segment of the population has the highest fertility, but what about the lowest? The US Census Bureau tracks these sorts of things in detail. So according to the Census Bureau the TFR’s in 2008 were:

2.09 – All races
1.84 – Non-Hispanic white
2.11 – Non-Hispanic black
1.84 – American Indian, Native Alaskan
2.06 – Asian & Pacific Islander
2.99 – Hispanic

Yes, Native Americans have the same TFR as non-Hispanic whites! Total surprise to me. The profile in relation to within wedlock and out-of-wedlock differs between the groups a fair amount. Here are the percents born to unmarried mothers:

40.6% – All races

28.6% – Non-Hispanic white
72.3% – Non-Hispanic black
65.8% – American Indian, Native Alaskan
16.9% – Asian & Pacific Islander
52.5% – Hispanic

So Native Americans combine low total fertility with a high proportion of out-of-wedlock births. I actually found births per 1,000 trend lines broken down by Hispanic ethnic group. There’s an interesting pattern here: