The notion that we've entered a second baby boom is a bust - up front

Forget the ''echo boom'' -- the idea that the postwar baby boomers are causing a second boom by filling bassinets of their own. Despite much popular speculation that the population is soaring, for nearly a decade the fertility rate in the U.S. has remained at a low of 1.8 births per woman -- below the rate needed to replace the parents' generation, says Charles Westoff, the director of the Office of Population Research at Princeton. The only thing that will keep America's population from shrinking, as those of most European countries have done, he writes in Science, is immigration.

Only 14 years ago, when Westoff was the executive director of the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, the commission sighed with relief when the fertility rate began to subside after attaining a peak of 3.8 births per woman. Now, he says, ''it is not beyond imagi- nation that the next population commission will be pondering inducements to marriage and childbearing.''

''Low fertility is more or less here to stay,'' Westoff believes, since it reflects not only more effective contraception but also ''changes in the status of women that do not seem reversible.'' Greater economic independence and new mores have led more women than ever before to postpone marriage and childbirth. In 1960 only 28 per cent of women between the ages of 20 and 24 had never married; in 1985 that number was 58.5 per cent. And the mean age for a woman's first birth is projected to be 25.3 by about 1991, nearly three years older than it was 20 years ago.

What's more, Catholics no longer pick up the slack in births. Despite the church's stand against contraception, ''there is no longer any distinctive Catholic fertility in this country,'' writes Westoff. In 1982 Catholic women reported an average of 1.96 children, compared with 1.92 for Protestant women and 1.79 for Jewish women.

Ethnicity seems a stronger determinant. Hispanics in the U.S. have the most babies, followed by blacks, whites, and Asians, though Westoff points out that this pattern may not be truly ethnic, but rather a reflection of group differences in education and ''the inverse relation between education and fertility.'' The more assimilated and educated women are, he says, the fewer children they have.

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