Among the things we don’t do anymore, making babies is probably the one we’ll miss the most.
Babies were born in America at a lower rate in 2020 than in any year in recorded history. This wasn’t merely a COVID baby bust — though it was that, too. It was the continuation of a long slide in baby-making in the United States, which follows the collapse in birthrates in Japan and Western Europe.
The hopeful but laughable assumptions that lockdowns would cause a quarantine baby boom (Because life is less busy and what else is a married couple going to do all day? Wink, wink!) could not have been more wrong. The 4% drop in the number of births from 2019 to 2020 was anchored by an 8% plummet in December, nine months after stay-at-home orders came down.
The 3.6 million babies born in the U.S. were the lowest number since 1979. The birthrate (babies per woman of childbearing age) has declined by nearly 20% since 2007.
Without immigration, the U.S. population would be shrinking. The fertility rate was already well below the replacement level of 2.1 babies per woman of childbearing age. And more people died than were born in half of the country — 25 states reported this grim fact, compared to the small handful that typically has more funerals than baby showers.
So, why is this happening? Some say it’s simply a statistical artifact of women having babies later. The numbers don’t bear that delayed-family thesis out, especially outside of the college-educated minority. The purely materialistic explanation — people can’t afford babies, especially not during a pandemic — is also unsatisfying, considering how many foreign governments have tried and failed to juice birthrates by subsidizing babies.
One clear culprit is what demographer Lyman Stone calls “workism.” Men and women both are elevating their jobs and careers to such lofty status that they have no time or love for little humans. During the lockdowns, this was exacerbated because work-from-home can easily become you’re-always-on-the-clock.
The underlying, half-hidden cause, though, might be a despondency we could call “civilizational sadness.” People on some level look around and ask, “Are we good?” The “we” could be humans, Americans, college-educated elites of Park Slope, or some other identity. If the answer is “no,” then who would want to make more of us — especially more than 2.1 of us?
So, during a pandemic when humans became vectors and the joys that other people could bring (camaraderie, neighborliness, spontaneous togetherness) became verboten or inhibited by masks, is it any wonder the people didn’t decide we need more of us?
