Despite most of the nation being holed up for the past year, there was quite a lack of “chilling” even as the viewership of Netflix and other streaming services exploded. Birth rates plummeted to a record low after five previous straight years of decline. Although better contraception use has contributed to a decrease in the abortion rate, protection doesn’t look like the key factor here. Instead, our population crisis is an intimacy one.
Although the coronavirus didn’t preclude married and dating couples from co-habitating and copulating, a startling number of people in the United States were single and evidently not ready to mingle, even prior to the pandemic. In 2019, a majority of adults 18 to 34 reported not having a steady partner, and nearly a quarter of 20-somethings reported having no sex in the prior year.
It’s true that millennials scarred by the Boomer embrace of family-shattering divorces have led to them waiting to enter more stable marriages, and in part, the decrease of the birth rate can be attributed to these happily married couples simply waiting to have children. Given the stark decrease of teen pregnancies, this isn’t an entirely terrible thing. But there is a darker half of the story.
A staggering 17% of millennials reported putting off having children because of the pandemic, and 15% said it made them less interested in having children at all. But second to the cost of having children, most millennials reported not having children because they lacked a suitable partner or spouse.
The loneliness of lockdowns has manifested itself in a multitude of ways, including soaring addictions and mental health crises. But perhaps nothing is quite as tangible as a generation of young people living like old maids, and local governments seem keen to exacerbate the problem.
Despite rising vaccination rates and sinking coronavirus cases, Mayor Muriel Bower of Washington, D.C., has still deemed dancing illegal and governors like Andrew Cuomo are reopening their states at a snail’s pace. Normal functions of how young people found partners prior to cellphones, be it parties or happy hours, are still being discouraged by the powers that be.
We’ll pay a literal price for this so long as we refuse to reform the entitlement programs driving our national debt to crisis numbers. But on an emotional level, the birth decline demonstrates a social crisis of normal human intimacy.
