BEIJING, July 18 (Xinhuanet) -- A baby "boomlet" may be underway in the United States, according to early federal data released Wednesday that reveal a record 4,315,000 babies were born in 2007.

    "I can't tell you anything about who's having these babies, but it is an early look and there is an increase," says federal demographer Stephanie Ventura. "It's a milestone."

    She says details about the mothers won't be available until the fall, because all the agency has now is birth certificate data from state health departments.

    The last time the number was this high was in 1957, in the middle of the baby boom years; about 78 million Americans were born from 1946 to 1964. Demographers have been monitoring gradual increases in recent years; data for 2006, which won't be made final until September, show a 3 percent increase over 2005. That's the largest single-year increase since 1989.

    "I suspect this is the beginning of a new kind of baby boom, although it's going to be nowhere near the baby boom of the 1950s or '60s," says demographer Arthur Nelson of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. "It will be sort of a boomlet."

    To be considered a real boom, demographers say, the percentage increases would have to be much larger than the single-digit increases we're seeing now.

    The last time there was talk of a boomlet was during the 1980s and '90s. Those babies were sometimes known as "Echo Boomers" and today are called Millennials or Generation Y.

    Nelson attributes the 2007 numbers to a "perfect storm" of factors: more immigrants having children, professional women who delayed childbearing until their 40s, and larger numbers of women in their 20s and 30s in the population, keeping the fertility rate high. The average number of births per woman was 2.1 in 2006, the highest since 1971.

    (Agencies)