Chile's plunging birth rate may foreshadow future in U.S.

toggle caption Tamara Merino for NPR

SANTIAGO, Chile — In a noisy market in a working class neighborhood in Santiago, Marisol Romero was selling bright balloons, little dolls and flowers to passers-by.

She's in her 50s and comes from a big family. Her mother had eight kids, which used to be common across Latin America.

But Romero said her own decisions about parenting were very different from her mother's. "I have only two children," she said.

Asked why she chose to have a smaller family, Romero laughed and said, "Because of the cost of living. I would have had more. My ideal was five. The reality was two."

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Romero is part of a global trend toward much smaller families that experts say is reshaping Latin American society, in particular, at an astonishing rate.

As recently as the 1990s, women across South America and the Caribbean had between three and four children on average.

toggle caption Tamara Merino for NPR

But according to the latest United Nations report, the region's fertility rate had fallen to fewer than two children per woman. That's well below the 2.1 "total fertility rate," a technical term used by researchers, that is widely considered the minimum necessary to maintain a stable population.

In Chile, meanwhile, the number has plunged even l