Results: Oh Baby! What Baby?

Within the first few months of the pandemic, everyone was expecting a baby boom. After all, with so many of us working from home, people asked to stay home, almost all social venues and outside activities cancelled, what else was there to do? Spending more time at home with a partner sounds like the perfect recipe for speeding up family planning. However, with increased job insecurity, health anxiety and the government encouraging people to stay away from hospitals, it'd seem Covid-19 made people reconsider. Are you one of the many who anticipated a Covid-19 baby boom?

Far from surging, fertility in the United States – which recently hit a 35-year low – is actually dropping as we continue to hunker down. The Brookings Institution has estimated that the U.S. birth rate will decline by another 7-10% this year, which amounts to about 300,000 to 500,000 fewer births. Canada will also see a decline, but not as much as the U.S., primarily because of Canada's public health care. And a Guttmacher Institute survey found that 34% of women said they wanted to get pregnant later or wanted fewer children because of the COVID-19 pandemic. If you are someone who had considered having a child this year, did you put it off for the time being?

The number of babies born globally has declined sharply in the last year, with the combined effects of the pandemic, lockdown restrictions and the global recession that followed all weighing on the fertility rate. The fertility rates have been falling for years now, and the pandemic only affected it. The falling birth rate is not all bad news -- it is being driven by more women in education and work, as well as greater access to contraception, leading to women choosing to have fewer children. In many ways, falling fertility rates are a success story. In your opinion, do you see the falling global fertility rate as: