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 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. Rates fell across almost all racial and ethnic groups.