Want Women to Have More Babies? Here's How.

What the pandemic baby bump tells us about reproductive decision-making

Photo by Lingchor on Unsplash

It’s an odd outcome, out of whack with most predictions about the pandemic’s effects: The US fertility rate actually went up in 2021, after more than a decade of decline.

This is surprising because periods of instability do not tend to fuel reproduction. When people are unsure about the future or insecure about their financial lives, they tend to put off baby-having. A pandemic and a recession led researchers to predict that fewer Americans would take the reproductive plunge: Life felt unstable, and the money just wasn’t there.

But here’s the thing about 2021, especially compared to 2020: Thanks to vaccines, life began to go back to normal, and it felt like stability was returning. Thanks to massive payouts to the American people after a year of very little ability to spend money on anything, the money was there, and there may have been more of it than ever — especially for the college-educated Americans who largely spent the pandemic working from home (anecdotally, I was stunned by how much money I managed to save in 2020 without the ability to travel, eat out, shop, or do much of anything for fun). And thanks to that same work-from-home arrangement, more time suddenly materialized, too: If you lived in Brooklyn and pre-pandemic had worked in Manhattan, Covid shutdowns gave you an extra hour and a half or so every single day.

A lot of bosses sucked up that time with work, but still — at home and unsupervised, life and work could mesh together, for better or worse. Maybe you were responding to emails at 8am and 10pm. But you were also running out to the grocery store at 11am, taking a walk at 2pm, and prepping dinner at 5.

For people who were already parents when the pandemic hit, this free time no doubt felt a lot less free. This is especially true for mothers, whose hours got eaten up by what researchers call “secondary childcare”: Supervising children while doing something else, a kind of maternal multitasking. And I say “maternal” because while fathers spent about an extra hour every day on secondary childcare in 2020, mothers of kids aged 5-12, who were already spending more time on this task than fathers, added an extra 2.4 hours of secondary childcare duties in 2020, bringing their daily average to 8.2 hours of this kind of caring-for-kids/doing-other-stuff-too every single day.

Is it any surprise to learn that the overwhelming majority of pandemic boom-babies are first children?

But it wasn’t just family size that determined whether or not women had children in 2021. It was also education, race, and class — and the demographics of women who had late pandemic babies may surprise you.