Birth Rates

1 Overview

Crude birth rates are calculated within race and single year of age, restricted to females aged 15-44.

• TBD - Utility to grow/decay birth rates to meet horizon year expectations.

2 Input Datasets

• CDC WONDER natality-current: Natality, 2007-2022
• CDC WONDER natality-expanded-current: Natality, 2016-2022 expanded
• Base/Launch Year Population

3 Methods

• Birth rates are calculated using CDC WONDER Natality births for 5-year age groups ranging from ages 15 to 44 setting "Suppressed" raw births (values < 10) to values of 4.5.
• Births are merged with the base/launch year population (aggregated to 5-year age groups), inflated to account for the % of births attributed to "unknown" race/ethnicity groups, and then QC'ed to ensure no race or 5-year age group contains 0 births or births greater than the total population within the category. Note that no inflation factor is made to account for births assigned to under 15 or 45+ ages.
• Crude birth rates are then calculated simply as births divided population within race and 5-year age groups and assigned back to single year of age groups.

Table 1: CDC WONDER Exports

Note there is preference given to using actual race/ethnicity category data when available (in 2018 the ucd-icd10-expanded becomes available), 5-year rates, and never including both 2020 and 2021 datasets together due to the outsize impact of COVID-19; in that respective order.