There was never a ‘COVID baby boom,’ and the baby bust is continuing in 2023
Timothy P. Carney
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The United States has been in a baby bust since 2008, with fewer births and a lower birthrate year after year for almost the entire last 15 years.
The year before COVID saw the smallest number of births in generations, 3.75 million. That was down from 4.32 million in 2007.
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Then, the COVID lockdowns caused the largest single-year percentage drop on record — almost 4% fewer babies, down to 3.61 million in 2020.
In 2021, some declared a COVID baby boom as births went up, which never happened. We had 3.66 million, which was about 50,000 more babies than in 2020. Then, in 2022, births dipped back down to 3.61 million, according to provisional data.
The earliest numbers for 2023 show things are continuing to drop. The first quarter of 2023 saw births 1% lower than the first quarter of last year.
Births are also down 2.5% compared to the first quarter of 2020, which was pre-pandemic. Zoom out, and you see a steady drop of about 0.8% per year, with some ups and downs in between because of COVID.
Some analysts had argued that the 2021 uptick and the 2022 flatlining counted as a “COVID baby boom.”
“The federal government was more generous than in earlier bouts of economic hardship, offering expanded unemployment benefits, extra-large stimulus checks and a bigger child tax credit,” the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell wrote.
Rampell added, “Flexible, commute-free work arrangements may have disproportionately given college grads the time and space to grow their families.”
It’s a plausible story, as one of the biggest factors dragging down birthrates has been parents’ (or would-be parents’) attachment to the office.
But the numbers over the past few years have suggested something less optimistic: We are in a prolonged chronic baby bust, and COVID made late 2020 and early 2021 particularly bad. Then, there was a brief makeup for that COVID dip, but we never got off of our chronic downward trend of births.
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Even before these early 2023 numbers came in, I noted the trend:
“Had we not had the pandemic, and instead had the number of births continued to decrease by that 1.16% rate, we would have had 10.98 million births in three years. Instead, we got 10.93 million births — which is to say that 2021 and 2022 were not a rebound in our baby-making but were partial makeups for 2020.”
The only conclusion is that the U.S. will have fewer and fewer births for the foreseeable future until our culture changes.