A dearth of births

Sometimes when I don't want to face something directly here at work, I go find a batch of statistics and dig into them. This morning, it was the large backlog of letters to the editor. In case you haven't heard, Evan Jenkins, Tom Scott, Bob Bailey and Bob Hayes are all great guys and deserve to be elected to whatever office they're running for. And the Huntington street levy and the park district user fee are either sorely needed or will drive everyone to the poor house.

So rather than face all that again, I found some stats at the Centers for Disease Control Web site. The site had the birth and death statistics for 2004, so I decided to compare the two. What I found didn't really surprise me.

If you put the number of births by state and the number of deaths by state side by side and divide births by deaths, you will see West Virginia had the lowest ratio. We barely had more births than deaths in 2004. To be precise, we had 1.00289 births per death. The national average was 1.72 births per death. The other old states -- Maine, Pennsylvania and Florida -- had ratios of 1.12, 1.14 and 1.29, respectively.

Utah had the highest ratio at 3.80, followed by Alaska at 3.39.

Unless, that is, you want to include the U.S. territories. The rates were 1.77 in Puerto Rico, 2.26 in the Virgin Islands, 5.01 in Guam, 5.99 in American Samoa and 8.23 in the Northern Marianas.

With this being the political season, it's easy to see one result of this. I don't see how West Virginia will hold on to all three seats in the House of Representatives after the reapportionment following the 2010 census. One of the three seats will go to a state with good population growth. That means either Alan Mollohan, Shelley Moore Capito or Nick J. Rahall will be out of a job, assuming all three are continually re-elected until 2012.

On another level, this has to make you wonder if West Virginia's economy is anything more than barely self-sustaining. The people having children are not the people remaining in West Virginia or moving here.