Anna McCreary gave birth to a daughter in October 2019. McCreary, who works for a law firm in Chicago, had just returned from maternity leave in early 2020 when the coronavirus pandemic hit. She and her husband found themselves working from home without daycare or other support. “We were thrown right into the middle of such a nightmare scenario. [having] There are none of the safety nets you expect when you have kids and you take all the responsibility,” McCreary says. She and her husband had always planned to have two children, but as her pandemic dragged on, she found it impossible to add a second child to her family. “Money could afford it, but time didn’t,” she says. Now that she is 40, she worries she may have missed the time to have her second child.
McCreary’s experience was not unusual. Early in the coronavirus pandemic, experts predicted a baby boom because they believed people forced to stay home to avoid the virus would have more time to have children. Instead, the opposite happened: baby bust. But while the country as a whole saw a decline in fertility in the first year of the pandemic, recent studies suggest some states have seen an increase in fertility.
The study was published in April. human reproduction, found that after the first wave of the pandemic in early to mid-2020, the U.S. fertility rate declined by 17.5 births per 100,000 women of reproductive age per month. It then returned to its pre-pandemic rate of decline following a second wave in the fall and winter of 2020. States and territories with the biggest birth rate declines had higher proportions of Democrats and non-white residents, and were more likely to practice social distancing. By contrast, states with more Republicans, fewer nonwhite residents, and less social distancing were more likely to have higher birth rates.
Throughout modern history, fertility rates plummeted after economic emergencies such as the 1929 stock market crash and the 2008 recession. But the U.S. fertility rate has been trending downward since early 2008, and that decline is consistent with similar trends in other wealthy countries in Europe and parts of Asia.
“We have seen that this was [prepandemic], Fertility rates tend to decline over time. We’ve also seen fertility decline quite sharply after emergencies, especially economic crises,” says Sarah Adelman, an environmental pediatrics researcher at New York University Langone Health. “Covid-19 wasn’t just a biological pandemic. It was social. It was economic.”
Previous studies have shown that fertility rates have declined during the pandemic, but little has looked at differences between states. Adelman and colleagues analyzed changes in fertility rates in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. during the first two waves of the pandemic. To do so, they used data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the 2020 U.S. Census, and the University of Virginia Weldon Cooper Public Service Center to calculate state populations nine months after each COVID-19 outbreak in 2021. Estimated. average gestational age. )
Many states, such as New York and Connecticut, saw birth rates decline during the first wave of COVID-19 in 2020, while others, such as Utah and Idaho, saw birth rates rise. In this study, changes in fertility rates did not correlate with the severity of the COVID-19 outbreak in a given state. Rather, they are associated with state political trends, with more fertility increases seen in red states, while blue states saw more decreases. Fertility was also negatively correlated with the degree of social distancing measured by cell phone GPS data analyzed by researchers at the University of Maryland. States with the greatest fertility declines also tended to have higher proportions of nonwhite residents.
The findings suggest that how “seriously” states and territories take the virus can have an impact on falling or rising fertility rates, Adelman said. In general, residents of Democratic-leaning states and Washington, D.C., were more likely to see COVID-19 as a greater threat, while residents of Republican-leaning states were less likely to see the disease as dangerous. Additionally, blue states in the northeast were hit hardest by the first wave of the virus, so people in those states may have been more likely to treat the virus as a threat. These states also have a high percentage of people of color, Adelman said, and a disproportionate number of people may be feeling unemployed and no longer able to care for their children. Although COVID-19 itself poses a risk, the study did not control for its impact on fertility.
Philip Cohen, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, who was not involved in the study, said the conclusion that the political climate and response to the pandemic had an impact on fertility was “very reasonable,” but that interpretation was somewhat open. said it was unreasonable. complicated. “I hesitate to put too much weight on the conclusion for several reasons. So even if there is a change in fertility, it is important to know whether it is because people deliberately chose to have fewer children or because they chose to have more. is difficult. In addition, some states in the United States have a higher percentage of babies born to people living abroad but visiting here to give birth, so part of the decline in fertility is due to the fact that these people are more likely to be affected by the pandemic. may have been unable to enter the United States because of Lockdown, Cohen said.
Adelman also notes that the study was somewhat underpowered, with only 51 data points (50 states and Washington, D.C.) and the limited conclusions that can be drawn from them.
Nonetheless, data suggests that in declining states, fertility rates have rebounded slightly after the second wave of COVID-19. Adelman said the arrival of an effective COVID-19 vaccine and the overall easing of restrictions around the pandemic may have contributed to the recovery, as people could consider adding to their families again. .
McCreary and her husband are currently discussing whether or not they want to have a second child, but McCreary said she wasn’t sure if it would be possible. “Now we’re like, ‘Now that things are a little more reasonable, let’s have a second child,'” she says. “But I am 40. It might be possible, but it is not possible without significant intervention. It may just be.”
