The baby bump may be temporary. But continued flexibility for couples in America to spend time with their babies might mean they make more of them in future too
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskAt first glance, the data from America suggest that covid did prompt a small baby bust. Birth counts fell from 3.75m in 2019 to 3.62m in 2020, and rebounded only partway to 3.67m in 2021.
In 2019, 23% of newborns in America had foreign-born mothers. Breaking down the data on pandemic-era births by mothers’ origin, the researchers found a striking discrepancy: foreign-born women gave birth to 91,000 fewer babies than pre-pandemic trends would suggest, whereas native-born ones had 46,000 more.
The researchers speculated that the shift to remote work explained much of native-born women’s rise in fertility. The increase was most marked among the college-educated, who are more likely to be able to work from home, in a country without any paid maternity-leave requirement or child-care subsidy.