Bernie Sanders isn't going anywhere.
Less than three weeks after suffering a heart attack, the Democratic presidential contender is beginning what he's calling a "vigorous" return to campaigning with a rally expected to draw thousands of supporters to New York City on Saturday afternoon. One of them will be Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders' latest high-profile endorsement, who will share the stage with Sanders this weekend and give his stagnant White House bid an instant dose of energy.
The event marks a coming-out party of sorts for the 78-year-old Vermont senator. He had emergency heart surgery this month but insists that he's more committed than ever to his 2020 White House bid. With the first voting contests less than four months away, he has some work to do.
Beyond health concerns, Sanders suddenly finds himself looking up at progressive rival Elizabeth Warren and establishment favorite Joe Biden in the polls. Now he must reassure voters that he has the physical stamina to go forward while addressing broader concerns that his policies may be too far left to defeat President Donald Trump in a general election.
Enter Ocasio-Cortez.
The endorsement from the 30-year-old progressive star "send the message that the movement is growing, that it's gaining influence, that it's gaining traction," Sanders' campaign manager Faiz Shakir said.
He predicted that the newly announced support from Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who will not be present Saturday, would help Sanders generate significantly more support from young people and minorities going forward.
"Those are two people who I think have immense power to mobilize young people, and I promise you you'll be seeing them in Iowa, but not only in Iowa, but around the country, trying to get people engaged around the issues," Shakir said.
For now, at least, Sanders can use the help.
While he pledged during this week's presidential debate to move forward with a "vigorous" campaign, he's moving cautiously in the short term. The rally in Queens is his only scheduled appearance before he returns to Iowa late next week.
The week after, he'll join Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., for a tour of her congressional district. Tlaib hasn't announced whether she'll join Ocasio-Cortez and Omar in endorsing Sanders, but she is also part of the so-called "Squad" of minority women on Capitol Hill who has been frequent targets of Trump's attacks.
Despite aggressive rhetoric from Sanders himself, senior adviser Jeff Weaver said Sanders would ease himself back onto the campaign trail. But by December, Weaver predicted, Sanders' health scare will be forgotten.
NEW YORK (AP) — 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.
But “the 2023 numbers seem to indicate that bump is over and we're back to the trends we were in before,” said Nicholas Mark, a University of Wisconsin researcher who studies how social policy and other factors influence health and fertility.
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.
Mark called that development surprising and said “there's some evidence that not just postponement is going on.”
Rates fell across almost all racial and ethnic groups.
The numbers released Thursday are based on more than 99.9% of the birth certificates filed in 2023, but they are provisional and the final birth count can change as they are finalized. For example, the provisional 2022 birth count appeared to show a dip, but ended up being higher than 2021's tally when the analysis was completed.
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.
The new data does raise the possibility of an impact on teens. The U.S. teen birth rate has been falling decades, but the decline has been less dramatic in recent years, and the drop seems to have stopped for teen girls ages 15 to 17.
“That could be Dobbs,” said Dr. John Santelli, a Columbia University professor of population and family health and pediatrics. Or it could be related to changes in sex education or access to contraception, he added.
Whatever the case, the flattening of birth rates for high school students is worrisome and indicates that “whatever we're doing for kids in middle and high school is faltering,” Santelli said.
More findings from the report:
—From 2022 to 2023, the provisional number of births fell 5% for American Indian and Alaska Native women, 4% for Black women, 3% for white women and 2% for Asian American women. Births rose 1% for Hispanic women.
—The percentage of babies born preterm held about steady.
—The cesarean section birth rate rose again, to 32.4% of births. Some experts worry that C-sections are done more often than medically necessary.
—The U.S. was once among only a few developed countries with a fertility rate that ensured each generation had enough children to replace itself — about 2.1 kids per woman. But it’s been sliding, and in 2023 dropped to about 1.6, the lowest rate on record.
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.
“There's something getting in the way of them being able to achieve those goals,” Mark said.
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
FILE - A pregnant woman stands for a portrait in Dallas, Thursday, May 18, 2023. According to provisional statistics for 2023 released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday, April 25, 2024, U.S. births fell last year, in a substantial drop marking an apparent end to pandemic-related fluctuations and a return to a long-standing national decline. A little under 3.6 million babies were born in the U.S. last year, about 76,000 fewer than the year before. (AP Photo/LM Otero, File)
