It may mean that Satan is ice skating in a frozen-over hell. Fertility in Utah — known for huge families — has for the first time dropped below the “replacement rate,” or the level where a generation can exactly replace itself.
“They said it would never happen here,” said Pam Perlich, senior demographer at the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Institute. “No one who knew the old Utah ever expected this to happen — or so quickly. The drop has been precipitous.”
The 2018 total fertility rate for Utah — the number of children each woman here would expect to have in her lifetime — has now dropped to 2.