Scientific American:

The COVID pandemic caused a U.S.-wide decline in fertility rates, but red states actually saw increases

By Tanya Lewis

Anna McCleary had her daughter in October 2019. McCleary, who works at a law firm in Chicago, had just returned from her maternity leave in early 2020 when the COVID pandemic hit. She and her husband found themselves working from home without access to day care or other help.

“We were just thrown into the middle of this sort of nightmare scenario of [having] all of your responsibilities, with none of the safety net that you expect when you have a kid,” McCleary says. She and her husband had always planned on having two children, but as the pandemic dragged on, adding a second child to their family felt impossible. “We could afford it with our money,” she says, but “we couldn’t afford it with our time.” Now, at age 40, she worries she may have missed the window to have a second child.

McCleary’s experience was not unusual. Early in the COVID pandemic, pundits predicted a baby boom because they believed that people who were forced to stay home to avoid the virus had more time to conceive children. Instead the opposite happened: a baby bust. Yet while the country as a whole saw declines in fertility rates in the pandemic’s first year, a recent study suggests that the rates in some states increased.
The study, which was published in April in Human Reproduction, found that the U.S. fertility rate dropped by 17.5 births per month per 100,000 women of reproductive age after the pandemic’s first wave in early to mid-2020. It then returned to a prepandemic rate of decline following the second wave in the fall and winter of 2020. The states and regions that had the biggest declines in fertility were more likely to have a higher percentage of Democrats and nonwhite residents and more social distancing. In contrast, states with more Republicans, fewer nonwhite residents and less social distancing were more likely to experience fertility increases.

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