The CDC recently released updated Natality (Births) data for 2016. State laws require birth certificates to be completed for all births, and Federal law mandates national collection and publication of births and other vital statistics data. The National Vital Statistics System provides access to statistical information from birth certificates and CDC makes this data available using the CDC Wonder tool. There are a wealth of category breakdowns of this data at national and regional levels subject to privacy suppression where the number of births is less than 10.
We have curated the birth data into a new CDC Natality Interactive. We have aggregated all of the major category breakdowns including gender, race, age of mother, education, gestational period, and many more since 2000. We have applied this at the national, state, and county level (where data is available). This Interactive is automatically available to subscribers as part of our growing Community Health library.
We will be diving into this data over the next several weeks and posting various video blogs and free Interactives. One topic sure to be interesting is teen birth rates. Teen birth rates continued to decline in 2016, but as you can see below, they have started to level off. In 2007, the teen birth rate across all races was 10.5%, but in 2016 it is now 5.4%. However the trend is not universal across all races. Asian teen births for example actually increased in 2016. We will look at this and other trends in the coming few weeks.
