Webinar explores how the COVID-19 pandemic shaped birth rates and why it matters

Among the countless aspects of life upended by the COVID-19 pandemic were many people’s decisions about whether and when to have children.

At the beginning of the pandemic, there was popular musing that people finding themselves stuck at home with nothing to do might lead to a baby boom, said Melissa Kearney, a professor of economics at the University of Maryland and director of the Aspen Institute’s Economic Strategy group.

But like others who study demography with an economic lens, Kearney expected a baby bust. “We know from lots of previous episodes — recessionary periods — that when there are economic downturns and uncertainty, that leads people to have fewer children at that time.”

Kearney spoke at a recent webinar hosted by the National Academies’ Societal Experts Action Network (SEAN) and Committee on Population that explored how the pandemic affected birth rates in the U.S., along with longer-term trends in birth rates.

Added to peoples’ economic concerns, she said, was a public health crisis that might lead them to worry about health implications and the ability to access medical facilities. The closest comparable event is the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918-1919, which led to a large decrease in birth rates despite the absence of modern contraceptives.

By analyzing data on birth rates for late 2020 and 2021, Kearney and her colleagues calculated that there were 62,000 fewer conceptions than usual during the first few months of the pandemic, which led to a baby bust six to nine months later. (That number also may include some early-term miscarriages and abortions, she noted.) But that trend reversed in summer and fall 2020, with 51,000 more conceptions than usual, which suggests that many people delayed their conceptions, said Kearney.

Those shifts tracked with unemployment rates, she explained, with the largest drop in conceptions happening when the unemployment rate spiked in April 2020, and the rebound occurring in late summer and fall as the employment rate recovered.

Overall, said Kearney, the pandemic led to a net loss of 11,000 “missing conceptions” that would otherwise have been expected.

“The COVID baby bust was short lived,” she said. “It was much smaller than certainly I expected to see in the spring of 2020. It quickly reversed.” The likely explanation is the swift recovery of the labor market and extensive federal spending that bolstered the material well-being of families — both of which prevented a greater increase in poverty and a larger drop in birth rates, she added.

A shift in who gave birth
COVID-19 led not just to a temporary drop in births but also to a marginal shift in who had babies, according to Jenna Nobles, professor of sociology and director of the Center for Demography and Ecology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research, conducted with a colleague at Stanford University, examined data on birth rates in California, which accounts for about 12% of U.S. births.

During the pandemic, births dropped among women in older age groups and those with greater education and resources, likely from intentional decisions that were enabled by greater access to contraception and abortion, Nobles said. “Our work here suggests that COVID-related fertility declines may reflect intentional fertility delays that are differentially available to better-resourced people.”

A greater proportion of babies born during late 2020 and early 2021 were born to younger people with fewer resources, she explained. This population was also more vulnerable to infection with COVID-19, which has consequences for birth outcomes: Infection during the third trimester increases chances of preterm birth by about 30% and is associated with higher rates of infants being in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). These birth outcomes are associated with longer-run developmental outcomes for children, including educational attainment, said Nobles.

“There are real consequences for maternal and child health outcomes because of [COVID-19] infection in pregnancy, and infection is distributed among the least-resourced people, and so this has the capacity to increase health inequality of new cohorts of Americans,” she said.

A ‘blip’ in a longer downward trend
The pandemic baby bust and rebound were minor events in the context of a larger downward arc in births, Kearney explained. “This bust and rebound during the COVID pandemic is really a blip on this much longer, sustained decline in U.S. birth rates.”

Between 1980 and 2007, birth rates were fairly stable, hovering between 64 and 70 births per 1,000 women, but that changed in 2008. “At the time of the Great Recession, birth rates fell, as we would have predicted … but curiously they never recovered,” she said.

Birth rates have dropped broadly among women, across educational levels and racial and ethnic groups, said Kearney. The only group of women that are having more children is women over the age of 30, but since they account for a small share of overall births, the increase is not enough to offset the drop among younger groups.

Kearney and her colleagues could find no economic conditions — unemployment rates, increased rental or child care costs, increased student debt load, changes in female wages — that could explain this continued decline.

“Our probing on this has led us to think that more likely what’s happening is that there are cohort differences in their attitudes and their inclinations toward having children,” she said. “That could reflect both shifted preferences and shifts in the time intensity of parenting, the cost of parenting, et cetera, across recent cohorts or generations.”

Impacts on policymaking
Changes in birth rates have the potential to shape policy in a range of ways, speakers pointed out. Nobles noted that the pandemic’s temporary shift in births toward people with fewer resources has implications for policymakers who want to support the well-being of infants and children.

Alfred Sundara, manager of projections and the State Data Center for the state of Maryland, explained how Maryland uses birth data to project future school enrollments. Projections based on birth rates shape the state’s planning about school facilities and transportation for students, and sometimes — for areas with declining birth rates — school closures, he said. The projections also determine how federal and state funding is allocated based on enrollment numbers.

State planners know that children born in a particular year will show up five years later in the state’s public or private school systems, Sundara said; and so based on the drop in birth rates that happened at the beginning of the pandemic, Maryland is predicting a small dip in public school enrollment for 2025.

Birth rates are also important to national economic and fiscal planning, Kearney said, noting that population growth is a key input to productivity and income growth, and so the longer-term drop in births has policy implications for the U.S.

“The worry is that the working age population becomes smaller, and correspondingly the age distribution of the population becomes older; without other changes, we’ll see lower growth in income per capita, we’ll see lower productivity growth,” she said. There’s also fiscal pressure, given that social insurance programs like Social Security require current workers to pay into a system that supports older beneficiaries. “As the age composition becomes more skewed, and there are fewer workers per older person receiving these benefits, it’s of course harder to fiscally sustain that.”

Both of these challenges could be addressed to some extent by bringing in more people of working age through immigration and by increasing productivity per worker, she added.

• Watch the webinar