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.