Demographers Terrified As Baby Bust Continues In USA

Wolfgang Lutz, an Austrian demographer, warned in 2006 that European nations were at risk of falling into a “fertility trap” in which there are fewer women alive to have babies; smaller families become the social norm; and low population growth reduces economic growth, fostering a pessimism that further suppresses the birthrate. It appears that Denmark, among others, has taken Lutz’s message to heart. A public service announcement urges older Danes, “Send your child on an active holiday and get a grandchild within nine months.” At the time Lutz raised the alarm, the U.S. seemed well clear of such a trap, with a total fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman, what demographers call the replacement rate, vs. 1.5 for the European Union. Now that the U.S. rate is below 1.7, that’s no longer assured.

Unromantic as it sounds, planning a family is a numbers exercise that factors in the age of the would-be mother, access to affordable child care, college costs, income, and job security. Toss in a national health emergency and an economic crisis that invites comparisons to the Great Depression, and the benefits of parenthood no longer pencil out for many. The Guttmacher Institute surveyed about 2,000 American women in late April and early May and found that 34% wanted to delay pregnancy or have fewer children as a result of the pandemic. That outweighed the 17% who said they wanted children sooner or more of them.

In June the Brookings Institution released a study predicting the U.S. is headed for “a large, lasting baby bust.” Its researchers forecast there will be 300,000 to 500,000 fewer children born in the U.S. in 2021 than there would have been absent the crisis, which amounts to a decrease of roughly 10% from 2019. That means the number of babies never born is likely to greatly exceed the number of Americans who’ve died from coronavirus, which is approaching 150,000. The effect on population will be longer-lasting as well: Many of the babies who aren’t being born would have lived into the 22nd century.

“A lot of people I know at work and friends are saying they don’t want to have children until this is over,” says Tori Marsh, director of research at GoodRx Inc., a price-comparison and coupon site for prescription drugs based in Santa Monica, Calif. Marsh, 29, postponed her wedding, which had been scheduled for November, because of the pandemic. “It is definitely pushing back the timeline” for babies, she says.

If couples fully make up for lost time by having more children later, this drop in the birthrate will end up being just a blip. But demographers predict that many, if not most, of the births that are delayed will never be made up. “There is this Panglossian narrative that delayed births will tend to recover, but statistically it doesn’t happen,” says Lyman Stone, chief information officer of Demographic Intelligence, a consulting firm whose clients have included Procter & Gamble and JPMorgan Chase.

Lack of time is the most important reason the birthrate is unlikely to revert back to trend once the pandemic is over. While young women will still have plenty of years to give birth to their desired number of children, older ones will need to space births more tightly to reach their targets in their remaining fertile years. Some will run out their biological clock waiting for baby-making conditions to improve.

“Every time that people decide to push back when they’re going to have their first kid or their next kid, some proportion will end up not having the child at all,” says Karen Guzzo, a sociology professor at Bowling Green State University and acting director of the Center for Family and Demographic Research. For couples who are already parents, says Guzzo, “the longer you wait to have your second or third child, the harder it is to, say, ‘Oh, I’m ready to have babies again.’ They say, ‘You know what? My family’s complete, I’m happy with what I have.’ ”

In the second half of the 20th century, the pattern in the U.S. and elsewhere was that fertility tended to fall during recessions and then bounce back when the economy recovered. Demographers expected that to happen after the 2007-09 recession, which at the time had been the deepest since the Depression. “People put off having children during the economic downturn and then catch up on fertility once economic conditions improve,” Pew Research Center wrote in an October 2011 report.

But the pattern broke. The post-recession rebound never came even as the U.S. economy staged the longest expansion on record. Birthrates for women in their 20s, which had dropped 25% or more during and shortly after the recession, kept falling, and they stayed flat for women in their 30s. “Had prerecessionary fertility patterns been sustained through 2019, there would have been 6.6 million more births, and nearly 3 million more women would have had their first child over the last 11 years,” says Kenneth Johnson, a sociologist and demographer at the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey School of Public Policy. (source)