Fertility in the Heart of the COVID-19 Storm

Daniel Dench, Wenhui Li, Ted Joyce, Howard Minkoff and Gretchen Van Wye

No 31070, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We describe how the COVID-19 pandemic affected reproductive choices in New York City, the most acutely impacted area of the United States. We contrast changes in New York City with reproductive outcomes in the rest of the US. We find that births to New York City residents fell 8.4% more between March, 2020 and February 2021 than that would have been expected given trends leading up to the pandemic. Births to US-born residents of New York City fell 5.5% over the same year, triple the observed decline in the rest of the US. Births to foreign-born New York City residents fell 11.4%, twice the decline observed in the rest of the US. Reported induced abortions to New York City residents fell precipitously whereas induced abortions nation-wide rose slightly. The acute downturn and robust recovery in births in New York City maps closely with the spike in mortality and its equally rapid decline three months later. We conclude that the fear and uncertainty in the early months of the pandemic is the best explanation for the sudden, but brief drop in births in New York City.

JEL-codes: I12 J10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
Note: CH EH
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published as Daniel Dench & Wenhui Li & Theodore Joyce & Howard Minkoff & Gretchen Van Wye, 2024. "Fertility in the Heart of the COVID-19 Storm," Population Research and Policy Review, vol 43(4).

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w31070.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Fertility in the Heart of the COVID-19 Storm (2024)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:31070

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w31070

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().