Babies Bumped

Learning from the Surprising Baby Bust of 2020

In the early days of the Covid pandemic, jokes about a coming baby boom were common. What would be more natural, many thought, than for couples now stuck at home together to do what couples have always done? How many new little bundles of joy would the United States expect to see in nine months?

Nine months and more have come and gone, and instead of a boom, most reports are now indicating a continued "baby bust." Official birth data from the final months of 2020 indicate that there were nearly 40,000 "missing births" in the U.S. last year, according to one Brookings Institution estimate.¹ To obtain this number, the researchers first compared fertility rates in the final quarter of 2019 to those in...