Despite widespread forecasts that the coronavirus pandemic would accelerate the decline in U.S. fertility rates, a baby bust failed to materialize in 2021, mainly because the 2020 decline can be attributed to a sharp drop in births to foreign-born women affected by international travel restrictions, according to a new working paper.
Economists from UCLA and Northwestern and Princeton universities found that there were 91,000 missing U.S. births from foreign-born mothers in 2020-2021, including a decline of nearly 60% of births to mothers born in China. Meanwhile, fertility rates from U.S. mothers fell by less than 1%, a difference “too small to be statistically meaningful.”
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“The 2020 decline in fertility rates occurred too soon for the decline to be a response to economic uncertainty or job loss during the COVID-19 recession, as predicted by standard economic models. Rather, the bulk of the decline was driven by sharp reductions in births to foreign-born mothers who accounted for 23% of all U.S. births in 2019,” wrote authors Martha J. Bailey, Janet Currie, and Hannes Schwandt.
Foreign-born mothers from China were likely affected by a monthslong travel ban in 2020, which barred non-U.S. citizens in China from entering the U.S.
The following year in 2021, which economists said would be the first year the effects of the pandemic on fertility rates would be noticeable, birth rates for U.S. mothers increased by 6.2% from pre-pandemic levels, marking the “first major reversal” in declining U.S. fertility rates since 2007.
Pandemic-era policies, such as remote work and COVID relief money, likely contributed to the change in trajectory, Schwandt said. The pandemic brought unprecedented change, with millions working remotely for the first time and the government shelling out billions of dollars in relief money to keep the economy from cratering.
“These additional payments, the work-from-home arrangement, and so on were likely contributors to those increases in birth rates,” Schwandt said. “So I think one upside, one long-term upside of the pandemic might be that in the U.S., working and having a family might have become a little bit easier.”
The small “baby bump” in 2021 was largely propelled by an uptick in those having their first babies and births among women under 25, which economists suggested meant the pandemic led women to start their families sooner. There was also an increase in birth rates for college-educated mothers 25-44 years old, who may have benefited from work-from-home flexibility.
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The economists found that combining the 2020 fertility decline and bump in 2021, the coronavirus pandemic led to a net increase of roughly 46,000 children among U.S. mothers.
“Our results suggest that unlike any other economic downturn in recent history, the COVID-19 recession increased rather than decreased fertility among U.S.-born women,” they wrote.
