
Government lockdowns enacted in response to the spread of COVID may have caused the “first major reversal” in nearly two decades for American fertility rates, according to a new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
The analysis, written by economists Martha Bailey, Janet Currie, and Hannes Schwandt noted that forecasts originally predicted a dramatic baby bust of 300,000 children to 500,000 children as a result of the lockdowns. Instead, births declined by only 76,000 more than the baseline, while American-born mothers saw a net increase in births of roughly 46,000 children by 2021.