Lockdown Blues Worsen Demographic Winter

Predictions that covid lockdowns would increase the birthrate have been blown out of the water by a combination of opinion polls and actual birth statistics.

A growing number of U.S. adults who do not already have children say they are unlikely ever to have them as birth rates continue to decline across the country, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

The Pew analysis is based on a sample of 3,866 U.S. adults ages 18 to 49 collected as a part of an extensive survey conducted Oct. 18 through Oct. 24.

Researchers asked respondents with no children to rate their desire to have them in the future, while adults who said they already have children were asked to rate their likelihood of having more.

Respondents were asked, "how likely is it that you will have children someday" in the future.

Forty-four percent of non-parents ages 18 to 49 said it is "not too" or "not at all likely," marking a 7 percentage point increase from the 37% who said the same in a 2018 survey.

Fifty-five percent of non-parents said they were either "very likely" or "somewhat likely" to have children someday, a decrease of about 6 percentage points from 2018.

When asked for a reason, over half — 56% of childless adults — said they just don't want them. The other 43% cited other reasons, including medical issues, finances, not having a partner, climate change and environmental concerns. 

Pew Research Associate Anna Brown notes that the latest findings are consistent with decreasing birth rates across the country, which were already at a record low before the COVID-19 pandemic and dropped even more because of the pandemic. 

The birth rate and fertility rate in the United States fell to a new historic lows in 2020 according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics.

The drop is related to the pressures from the COVID-19 pandemic but larger social factors are also contributing to the precipitous decline in births, some say. 

The CDC announced that the provisional number of births in the U.S. in 2020 was over 3.6 million, a decline of about 4% from 2019 and the lowest number of births since 1979. Additionally, 2020 marked the sixth consecutive year that the number of births in the U.S. declined after an increase in 2014.

The general fertility rate, the report states, was about 55.9 births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44, down 4% from 2019 to a new record low in the U.S.

The provisional total fertility rate (an estimate of the number of births a hypothetical group of 1,000 women would have over their lifetimes based on the age-specific birth rate in a given year) also fell to a new record low in the U.S. in 2020 — 1,637.5 births per 1,000 women, a decrease of about 4% from 2019.

The fertility rate in the U.S. has been “below replacement since 1971 and has consistently been below replacement since 2007,” according to the report. This means that more people are dying than are born each year.

The government figures reveal that birth rates among women ages 20 to 24 and 25 to 29 fell by 6% and 4%, respectively, both of which are record lows among those demographics. Birth rates also fell by 4% and 2% respectively among women ages 30 to 34 and 35 to 39, but those numbers are not historic lows.

The pandemic had many people spending more time at home and many believed a baby boom was brewing as a result. Instead, what has happened is a "baby bust," which will only worsen the demographic winter already afflicting the USA and indeed the entire developed world. There will be a high price to pay for breaking a law of God so important that it was commanded in Genesis not once, but twice!

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