ROOKE: America Needs More Teen Moms

Getty Images / George Marks

Welcome back to Good Life, a newsletter about navigating our modern culture and staying sane in the process. This week, I was sent a graph about birth rates that sent me down memory lane to the day 15 years ago when my husband and I got married.

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Apparently, we aren’t supposed to worry about birth rate declines in younger women because the trend shows they are making up for it in their later years. However, the graph The New York Times shared doesn’t even begin to tell the full story.

At first glance, the graph suggests that declines in American birth rates among younger women are offset by older women having more children, supporting the idea of a temporary postponement of motherhood, with a full catch-up as these women age.

Paul Novosad, founder of Development Data Lab, called the NYT graph a “felony-level chart crime” because it created a misleading visual impression of balance and recovery. When he replotted the data to show changes in the actual number of births by age group (rather than percentage changes in rates), the supposed recovery is nowhere to be found.

Since 2007, the number of U.S. births to women aged 15–19 has dropped by about 320,000. Births to women aged 20–24 have declined by around 552,000, and births to women aged 25–29 have fallen by roughly 326,000.

Here’s what the Upshot’s graph looks like when we do it in number of births instead of % changes. This was a felony-level chart crime. https://t.co/UFgKBpMu0o pic.twitter.com/7rH1KzTJCD — Paul Novosad (@paulnovosad) April 13, 2026

Here’s what the Upshot’s graph looks like when we do it in number of births instead of % changes.

This was a felony-level chart crime.........

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