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...
Want to see the rest of this article?
Would you like to see the rest of this article and all the other benefits that Issues Online can provide with?
- Useful related articles
- Video and multimedia references
- Statistical information and reference material
- Glossary of terms
- Key Facts and figures
- Related assignments
- Resource material and websites