Financial Times April 18th , 2022
Baby Bust, Economic Stimulus helps birth rebound from pandemic
At the start of the COVID epidemic there was plenty of speculation that lock-down would cause a miniature baby-boom. Looking across many countries, it is clear that there was a sharp fall in monthly births in late 2020 and early 2021. The Financial Times compared pandemic months with comparable pre-COVID months. Those babies were conceived 40 weeks earlier. Conception decline coincided with the first few months of the COVID pandemic. In those months this was a unknown disease, death rates were not understood and there was no talk of a vaccine becoming available anytime soon.
Countries ranging from China to France reported their lowest number of monthly births since records began. Italy’s number of births fell below any number since the founding of the country in 1861. The pattern is not totally consistent. Some countries such as Germany showed little drop. Iceland even “outperformed” the pre-COVID months.
The article draws the parallel with the drops in birth during other traumatic events. They use examples such as the 1918 Flu epidemic, the Great Depression and the recent global financial crisis. They argue that people do not want to bring children into the world at times of uncertainty. That uncertainty could be health or economic driven.
Births around the world began to recover in late 2021. Those babies would have been conceived in a very different environment. Vaccines were arriving even though we still had lock-downs in many parts of the world. The US Audit Office reported that not only had the numbers returned to pre-COVID levels but there had been a “bounce-back". People were making up for lost time.
England and Wales suffered a 5% decline in babies in the 1st Half of 2021 compared to 2019. In the second half of the year they returned to the 2019 level.
It is now clear that in many countries COVID was a temporary phenomenon when it comes to fertility. The Financial Times claims that this was due the injection ofeconomic support by governments. According to them this reduced the financialand job risks for potential parents. I am less convinced because of the shortterm nature of the effect. The "bounce-back" came very quickly. COVID was a threat to everyone’s health. No one knew in the early daysthe impact on pregnant mothers and their unborn babies. Was this more importantthan short or long run job security?