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Friday, March 5th, 2021

We Expect 300,000 Fewer Births Than Usual This Year

Author:     Melissa S. Kearney and Phillip B. Levine
Source:     The New York Times
Publication Date:     March 4, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET
 Link: We Expect 300,000 Fewer Births Than Usual This Year
Stephan:   Men with markedly lower sperm counts, women choosing to have fewer babies, and later in life. Increasing poverty. A spectrum of trends is suggesting that the fear of overpopulation so strongly believed by futurists, although not by me, was wrong and that exactly the opposite situation is likely.
A young couple with their newborn daughter. Credit: Alice Proujansky/ The New York Times

The Covid-19 pandemic has thrown the country into an economic recession and an unprecedented restructuring of our work and social lives. Early on, some likened the public health crisis to a blizzard, imagining that people would stay home, cozy up with their romantic partners and make babies.

These playful visions have given way to a more sobering reality: The pandemic’s serious disruption of people’s lives is likely to cause “missing births” — potentially a lot of them. Add these missing births to the country’s decade-long downward trend in annual births and we can expect consequential changes to our economy and society in the years to come. Unfortunately, there are no easy fixes.

Research we did last year showed that the Covid pandemic would lead to a decline in U.S. births of about 8 percent, as compared with the number of expected births without a pandemic, resulting in 300,000 fewer births this year than would otherwise be expected. This prediction was based largely on the fact that […]

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1 Comment

  1. Rev. Dean on Sunday, March 7, 2021 at 7:11 am

    We also have approximately 500,000 immigrants at the border waiting to live here and make up the difference and may solve the problem, although not to Republicans, who only want white supremacists in our country.