Covid-19 : why there will be no baby boom

Ear­ly on in the pan­de­mic, as govern­ments were star­ting to rea­lise the magni­tude of the Covid-19 cri­sis and the first wave of stay-at-home orders with busi­ness and school clo­sures were being imple­men­ted, news sto­ries about what this new situa­tion would mean for the fer­ti­li­ty rate star­ted appea­ring. Visi­bly, as the virus was run­ning wild, so was our fantasy. 

These ear­ly news sto­ries almost enti­re­ly focu­sed on the posi­tive effects of stay-at-home orders on couples’ inter­course. As such, a coming baby boom was being hai­led, fuel­led by wide­ly cir­cu­la­ting sto­ries of increa­sed births that fol­lo­wed 9 months after stay-at-home orders during hur­ri­canes or snows­torms. Some news­pa­pers went so far as to chris­ten this novel gene­ra­tion of expec­ted chil­dren the “Coro­nials”.

Most experts, howe­ver, were scep­ti­cal of this nar­ra­tive. In fact, the research we have on past sud­den stay-at-home orders is much more timid in its conclu­sions than the popu­lar myths that took hold. A rigo­rous stu­dy of the great 1965 New York elec­tri­ci­ty bla­ckout found no effect on the fer­ti­li­ty rate ¹and, while light storm war­nings lead to a 2.1% uptick in births 9 months later, strong hur­ri­cane war­nings lead to a ~2.2% decrease in the num­ber of new­borns nine months later². 

Moreo­ver, there alrea­dy exists a sub­stan­tial body of research on how human fer­ti­li­ty rates tend to play out during and after pan­de­mics ; the fin­dings of which sug­gest that what was still being exci­ted­ly clai­med on after­noon tele­vi­sion by couples’ coun­cil­lors was une­qui­vo­cal­ly false. His­to­ry tells us that pan­de­mics do not drive baby booms. Rather, it is the oppo­site : most of the time they result in a severe baby bust. 

The clo­sest his­to­ri­cal ana­lo­gy we can look back to is the 1918 Spa­nish Flu, ano­ther tru­ly glo­bal pan­de­mic – although it should be noted that it was consi­de­ra­bly more dead­ly for young people than Covid-19, with the majo­ri­ty of excess mor­ta­li­ty in 1918 hap­pe­ning among the 20–40 year old popu­la­tion ³.  The fer­ti­li­ty les­sons from the Spa­nish flu are clear : whe­ther you look in France, the Uni­ted States or Swe­den ⁴, birth rates in all coun­tries stu­died drop­ped sub­stan­tial­ly, by about 13% in the US and by about 8% in Swe­den as soon as the pan­de­mic broke out. 

Short­ly after the first lock­down orders were given in France, we deci­ded to look at how U.S. cities that imple­men­ted non-phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal inter­ven­tions, such as stay-at-home orders, busi­ness, and school clo­sures during the 1918 pan­de­mic fared in terms of fer­ti­li­ty ⁵. As could be expec­ted, fer­ti­li­ty plum­me­ted by an ave­rage of 10–15% due to Spa­nish Flu in the cities we stu­died. Howe­ver, the drop was less pro­noun­ced in cities that imple­men­ted lon­ger las­ting and stric­ter measures. 

As such, we consi­de­red the pos­si­bi­li­ty that maybe there was some­thing to the much-heral­ded link bet­ween staying at home and increa­sed inter­course after all ? Howe­ver, ano­ther stri­king cha­rac­te­ris­tic of cities that imple­men­ted lon­ger lock­downs was that they had consi­de­ra­bly less severe pan­de­mic out­breaks with much lower num­bers of mortality. 

The­re­fore, ano­ther pos­sible expla­na­tion was that lock­downs only increa­sed birth rates because they redu­ced the nega­tive effects that a strong pan­de­mic out­break had on people’s deci­sion to have babies. To control for that we consi­de­red the strength of pan­de­mic out­break in our sta­tis­ti­cal models. After doing so, the net effect of lock­downs on fer­ti­li­ty rate was nega­tive – mea­ning less babies were born as a direct conse­quence of lock­downs, beyond their effects on pan­de­mic strength. 

Coming back to the cur­rent pan­de­mic, the first data-based insights on what to expect come from sur­veys and from google search data. Sur­veys conduc­ted in March and April of 2020 in France, Ger­ma­ny, Spain, Ita­ly, and the UK sho­wed that people aged 18–34 were increa­sin­gly plan­ning to post­pone or aban­don their child­bea­ring plans for 2020. In Ita­ly, where the out­break was par­ti­cu­lar­ly strong, only 26% of indi­vi­duals that plan­ned to get pre­gnant in 2020 said they still had those plans, with 37% plan­ning to post­pone and 37% saying they had aban­do­ned their child plans. In France only 14% repor­ted aban­do­ning the child plans but 51% did report that they would post­pone them if pos­sible. ⁶. 

Ano­ther approach was to use Google Searches. It is pos­sible to pre­dict fer­ti­li­ty rates based on the fre­quen­cy of com­mon search terms, such as “ovu­la­tion”, “pre­gnan­cy test” and “mor­ning sick­ness” among­st others. When this ana­ly­sis was applied to the Uni­ted States, this type of model fore­sees a fer­ti­li­ty drop of 15% for the coming months. ⁷.

Final­ly, we are also star­ting to get a first glance at fer­ti­li­ty data from 2020 and, in doing so, we see that they sup­port the baby bust hypo­the­sis. In France there was a fer­ti­li­ty drop of 2% for the year and in the U.S. one of 3.8%, which howe­ver was 8% for the month of Decem­ber, when the pan­de­mic effects star­ted to real­ly show ⁸.

Many ques­tions remain. Did stay-at-home orders and school clo­sures have an addi­tio­nal effect that was inde­pendent of the pan­de­mic this time around ? Did eco­no­mic aid, in the places where it was avai­lable, reas­sure people to conti­nue their fami­ly plan­ning and the­re­by cushion the fer­ti­li­ty drop ? Will the pre­dic­ted eco­no­mic boom fol­lo­wing the Covid cri­sis lead to cat­chup fer­ti­li­ty, making up for the fore­gone births ? As resear­chers conti­nue to eva­luate these ques­tions, for the short-term we must contend with a world in which less babies are one of the many conse­quences the virus has had on our lives.