This week, correspondent Jon Wertheim reported from Japan, the land of declining sons and daughters.

Over the last 15 years, the East Asian country has seen its population decline, amid low birth rates and falling marriage rates.

Last year, more than two people died for every baby born in Japan, a net loss of almost a million people.

60 Minutes reported on efforts by the Tokyo government to reverse this: shortened workweeks for government workers and a citywide dating app, both initiatives aiming to encourage people to get married and start families.

A young leader was elected to the Japanese Parliament last year; her campaign centered on transforming rural areas—where there have been diminishing economic opportunities—into viable working and living environments for young families. She believes revitalizing the countryside will help ease the population decline.

While these efforts are just the latest attempts to address demographic issues, previous attempts by the government have not made a significant impact on the country’s fertility rate.

Wertheim told 60 Minutes Overtime that, in some ways, Japan is a “canary in a coal mine.”

“This is a real barometer of what a number of countries, the United States included, is going to confront in terms of demographics in the next decades and even centuries,” he said.

In fact, like Japan, the United States has seen its birth rate steadily decline over the last 15 years.

In April, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that the total fertility rate was 1.6 children per woman in the United States, or 1,626.5 births per 1,000 women.

That is a less than 1% increase from 2023— a year that marked a record low, and well below the total fertility rate of 2.1 needed to naturally maintain the population.

60 Minutes Overtime spoke with Dr. Thoại Ngô, chair of Columbia University’s Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health.

“The big data story from the CDC data is that women under the age of 30 are having less babies,” Dr. Ngo explained.

“Teenage pregnancy has been declining and… [there’s] a macro-societal shift on how people value family, work, and personal fulfillment moving forward.”

Breaking down the data

The CDC data shows the birth rate of teenagers between 15 and 19 dropped from 13.1 to 12.7, part of a long downward trend that started in the 1990s.

60 Minutes Overtime also spoke with Dr. Karen Benjamin Guzzo, director of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina.

Guzzo said the largest contributing factor to the decline in teenage pregnancies is the increased use of more effective contraception.

“The United States has always had much higher rates of teen and unplanned pregnancies than other countries,” Dr. Guzzo explained.

“This is a success story… that people are able to avoid having births early on, when they themselves would say, ‘This is not the right time for me.'”

But taking overall trends into account, American women between the ages of 20-29 are also having fewer babies, and may be opting out of having children altogether.

Dr. Kenneth M. Johnson is senior demographer at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.

In an interview, Dr. Johnson said finding out what’s happening among this particular age group is the “big question” and many factors are at play.

He pointed to one trend that could explain part of it: many young women are delaying marriage, and a significant share of that group is delaying having children.