Effect of lockdowns on birth rates in the UK
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Effect of lockdowns on birth rates in the UK
Ann Berrington, University of Southampton and Joanne Ellison, University of Southampton
Many wondered whether the COVID lockdowns would lead to a baby boom or a bust. We finally have some answers – for the UK, at least.
Broadly, provisional data from the Office for National Statistics suggests there was a temporary decline in babies conceived during the first three months of the first lockdown in 2020, but then the fertility rate rebounded to levels above those seen in previous years. Let’s take a closer look.
The earliest we would have expected COVID to affect people’s decisions to become pregnant would have been February 2020, influencing births on average from November 2020.
In the graph below, the number of monthly births are plotted for the years 2018-21 in Scotland, England and Wales, and Northern Ireland. You can see that before the pandemic, the number of births had been falling in all countries of the UK.
By 2019, the average fe...
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