Prine to reject city's second settlement offer as saga continues

Mobile Police Chief Paul Prine said in a statement he will reject a second settlement offer from the city. The settlement, which the administration gave him until Friday at noon, would’ve made him a consultant for MPD.

Read the rest of the story here: Prine to reject city's second settlement offer as saga continues | News | lagniappemobile.com

US births fell last year, marking an end to the late pandemic rebound: experts

U.S. births fell last year, resuming a long national slide.

A little under 3.6 million babies were born in 2023, according to provisional statistics released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s about 76,000 fewer than the year before and the lowest one-year tally since 1979.

U.S. births were slipping for more than a decade before COVID-19 hit, then dropped 4% from 2019 to 2020. They ticked up for two straight years after that, an increase experts attributed, in part, to pregnancies that couples had put off amid the pandemic’s early days.

Birth rates have long been falling for teenagers and younger women, but rising for women in their 30s and 40s — a reflection of women pursuing education and careers before trying to start families, experts say. But last year, birth rates fell for all women younger than 40, and were flat for women in their 40s.

Rates fell across almost all racial and ethnic groups.

There could be an adjustment to the 2023 data, but it won’t be enough to erase the “sizeable” decline seen in the provisional numbers, said the CDC’s Brady Hamilton, the new report’s first author.

Experts have wondered how births might be affected by the June 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision that allowed states to ban or restrict abortion. Experts estimate that nearly half of pregnancies are unintended, so limits to abortion access could affect the number of births.

The new report indicates that the decision didn’t lead to a national increase in births, but the researchers didn’t analyze birth trends in individual states or dissect data among all demographic groups.

Surveys suggest many U.S. couples would prefer to have two or more kids but see housing, job security and the cost of child care as significant obstacles to having more children.

READ MORE: US births fell last year, marking an end to the late pandemic rebound: experts (nypost.com)