The stork has a less busy time in US amid virus pandemic

Birth and fertility rates fell in the United States last year during the Covid-19 pandemic, and much of this year is not expected to be different.

The drop is not anomalous but rather a downturn in a steady decline in birth rates since 2007.

Just over 3.6 million babies were born in the US last year, down 4 per cent from 2019, data shows. Birth rates declined for women across all races and age groups, with the steepest among those aged 15-19.

"There were 53.9 births per 1,000 women (at an annualised rate) in the last quarter of 2020," the Brookings Institution wrote in a paper in May. "That is substantially lower than the 57.6 annualised births per 1,000 women in the last quarter of 2019."

The dip is not unexpected. Births had gone down previously in times of economic distress and uncertainty.

Rather, it is a downturn in a larger trend of a steady decline in birth rates in the US - long visible in Asian countries like Japan and South Korea - driven by multiple factors but prominently women's higher levels of education, autonomy and affluence, and having their first child later.

The further decline emerged in the last quarter of last year and persisted through most of this year.

In May, Pew Research wrote: "Some estimate that there will be close to 300,000 fewer births in the US in 2021 as a result of the outbreak.

"These conjectures are already coming to fruition based on provisional monthly estimates. Overall, the US birth rate dropped 4 per cent in 2020 based on provisional data, and a look at December 2020 - the month when babies conceived at the beginning of the pandemic would have been born - shows an 8 per cent decline from the previous December."

Professor Mauro Guillen, incoming dean at the University of Cambridge's Judge Business School, said: "Young couples are postponing (having babies). Eventually they will have the baby that they want to have. But even just the mere postponement brings down the birth rate."

The pandemic plunge has been driven, analysts say, primarily by uncertainty over the future. This includes economic anxiety on the back of widespread job losses exacerbating the worry about not being able to afford children.

Raising a child to age 18 in America costs parents an average of US$230,000 (S$310,776), a 2020 Merrill Lynch report concluded.

"Most of what you're seeing in the 2020 numbers is the continuation of a decline in births," Northwestern University's Associate Professor of Sociology Christine Percheski told The Sunday Times.

"That reflects a few different trends - a drop in teen births happening since about 2008, and (an increase) in the age when women have their first birth."

"I expect to see a bigger drop in births in 2021 because of the pandemic," Prof Percheski added. "But the question about what will happen in 2021 and how fast things will rebound is going to depend partly on what happens with the virus, which is hard to predict.

"I think it's likely by 2022 or 2023 that the pandemic-specific drop will see a rebound. But this longer-term trend of a drop... I don't really expect that to change dramatically (or) quickly."

The birth rate decline, and the pandemic-induced drop, would normally add up to an ageing population sometime in the future.

But there is a factor in play in the US which is not an issue in many other countries - immigration.

It is certainly subject to both US policy, and conditions in the countries where the immigrants are from. But the US is built on immigration, and while that is an increasingly hot potato issue politically, the current administration is open to more of it.

Prof Guillen sometimes jokes that the US also has a "one-child policy", referring to China's decades-long population control policy that was recently abolished.

"It's called college education for women... In the United States right now, there are more women in college than men... They're not going to have as many babies as their mothers, or as their grandmothers. It's as simple as that."