Kansas City, Mo. ? Daffny Atwell would love to have another baby. Her son, Nathaniel, turned 1 this month, and she’s ready for more.

But she can’t afford it. Her Pampered Chef business is hurting as many of the people she knows are looking for work and barely scraping by.

“A baby is an awesome thing, but when you have so much stress, you don’t want to bring a baby into that and have to worry so much,” said Atwell, 19, of Leavenworth, Kan.

Chalk up another casualty of the worrisome economy: baby-making.

A “baby bust” strikes when times are bad — the Great Depression and the oil recession of the mid-’70s saw record lows in U.S. birth rates.

It’s still early to have a full view of the current recession’s birth rates, given that it takes nine months to make a baby and government statistics lag behind real time. But demographers are seeing signs that Americans are holding back again as unemployment nears 10 percent and legions more are worried about providing for a family.

For example, Missouri’s birth rate — the number of births per 1,000 women of child-bearing age — in the first five months of this year dropped 6 percent, a decrease that state demographers called substantial.

The decline is the biggest change Missouri has seen in birth rates in the last five years.

“It’s a very big change,” said Carl Haub, senior demographer at the Population Reference Bureau in Washington. “It kind of sticks out.”

Kansas hasn’t reported birth rates for 2009, but last year births were down in Kansas, Missouri and across the country. In Kansas, women gave birth to 136 fewer babies, a 0.3 percent decline after birth rates had increased or stayed the same since 2004.

The decrease was greater in Missouri, where births declined 1.2 percent last year. Missouri demographers noted that the economy may have contributed to that dip, the state’s first since 2002.

Nationally, the birth rate dropped last year to the lowest point since 2002.

A baby bust is part of an emerging picture of how the economy is shaping family life. Fewer people are moving as job opportunities dry up, fewer people are getting married and fewer are divorcing.

“Everyone is frozen in place, scared to make a decision about the future,” said Laura Lindberg, a researcher for the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit organization that is dedicated to reproductive health issues.

Lindberg was the lead researcher on a survey the institute recently released of middle- and low-income women that found almost a third were putting off having a child because of the economy.

Almost half wanted to delay having a baby, the survey found, and 28 percent of the women wanted fewer children because of the economy.