Update: This article has been updated with additional states reporting recent birth data.
When the pandemic first spread to the United States, many joked that widespread blockades would cause a “baby boom” and high birth rates. But almost a year later, the opposite seems to be true.
Provisional birth rate data provided to CBS News by 29 state health departments show a decrease of approximately 7.3% in births in December 2020, nine months after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 as pandemic. California, the most populous state, recorded a 10.2% decline, to 32,910 births in December, from 36,651 the previous year. In the same time period, births decreased by 30.4% in Hawaii.
Although the birth rate has been falling for nearly a decade, Phil Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, said the December drop was the largest he has seen since the baby boom ended in 1964.
“The scale of this is really big,” Cohen said in a phone interview with CBS News. “Regardless of whether you think it’s good or bad to have a lot of kids, the fact that we suddenly have fewer means things aren’t going well for a lot of people.”
As more states report birth data, the rate of decline could change. Texas, which accounts for nearly 9 percent of the U.S. population, will have no data from December through the end of March. Birth data for New York, the fourth most populous state, were only available until 2018.
“We don’t know if it’s the beginning of a bigger decline next year or if it’s just a shock from March,” Cohen said. “But I’m more inclined, based on history, to think that all of next year will be very low for births.”
In June, the Brookings Institution speculated that the pandemic would cause 300,000 to 500,000 fewer births in 2021, citing “tremendous economic loss, uncertainty and insecurity.” The think tank later revised the forecast to 300,000 due to a “labor market that improved a little faster than we expected,” but noted that new problems, such as widespread school closures and daycares, could also lead to fewer births.
Among the 32 states that had annual data available, there were about 95,000 fewer births in 2020 compared to the previous year, a decline of approximately 4.4%, according to data collected by CBS News. All states recorded a drop except New Hampshire, which recorded four additional births in 2020 compared to 2019.
The initial data are online with a survey led early in the pandemic by the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research group. The survey, published in May, found that about a third of women said they delayed pregnancy or wanted fewer children because of the pandemic.
“What we’re seeing now is that these attitudes develop in their actual behaviors,” said Laura Lindberg, Guttmacher’s lead researcher who was the author of the study.
Turbulent economic conditions and weak labor markets have historically led to a decline in birth rates. But Lindberg says the fall from the pandemic is much larger than normally expected; as a result of the Great Recession, birth rates only fell by about 3%.
“The impact of COVID on our lives is unprecedented and right now is far from over,” Lindberg said in a telephone interview with CBS News. “As long as people have more confidence in the economy and the state of the world, concerns about having children will continue.”