Home all day, just hubby and wife, with nowhere to go. For months on end. The predictions became ubiquitous, with winks and chuckles.
There was going to be a quarantine baby boom.
Instead of boom-boom, we got a bust.
Scholars at the Brookings Institution estimated in December that COVID-19 and its many social and economic consequences would result in some 300,000 fewer U.S. births in 2021. One survey they used, which was conducted in the spring when the pandemic was still new and its trajectory looked especially grave, found that one-third of women wanted to get pregnant later or wanted fewer children because of the pandemic.
Whatever the final numbers ultimately bear out, births are already trending downward in some states where 2020 data is available. Through December, nine months from the pandemic onset, births in Arizona, California, Florida, Hawaii, and Ohio were down by more than 50,000 over a year earlier.
It’s not a uniquely American trend, either. Births in Western Europe and Japan fell toward the end of 2020 over 2019 levels, especially in Italy, where they fell 21.6% from December 2019 to December 2020, per initial estimates.
“All evidence points to a sharp decline in fertility rates and in the number of births across highly developed countries,” Tomas Sobotka, a researcher at the Wittgenstein Center for Demography and Global Human Capital in Vienna, told the Wall Street Journal.
The boom that was anticipated, if half-jokingly, had seemed sensible for another reason. The pandemic created conditions that could be thought to encourage people to reflect on what’s important, on their mortality, on their dreams and families, and to dispose them to think more readily about children.
My wife, Claire, an adoption social worker in the Washington, D.C., area, has seen increased interest in children. More and more people came to her agency early in the pandemic, looking to expand their family. Interest in adopting remained higher than normal throughout the summer, so much so that the agency had to create an additional waitlist for new applicants.
But as demand rose, supply fell.
Fewer babies were being put up for adoption as the pandemic passed nine months. The theory is that without bars, with fewer parties, and less fraternization in general, there was less opportunity for the behavior that results in pregnancies — especially among the teenagers who are more likely to turn to adoption agencies when expecting.
Unless something changes (or rather, unless scores of couples changed their minds in the latter half of last year), the pandemic will be remembered for creating a birth dearth, not a baby boom.
