Laboratory

Demographic Data

At a Glance Projects Publications Team

Project

The Impact and Consequences of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Fertility

Aiva Jasilioniene, Dmitri A. Jdanov, Domantas Jasilionis, Isabella Marinetti, Mikko Myrskylä; in Collaboration with Tomáš Sobotka, Kryštof Zeman (both: Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna Institute of Demography, Austria)

Detailed Description

The COVID-19 pandemic was the largest global health crisis of the last decades. The experienced health threat, lockdowns and other restrictions adopted by countries to combat the pandemic had wide-ranging and complex effects on individuals and families. Much research attention initially focused on COVID-19 morbidity and trends in excess mortality associated with the coronavirus, but the lockdowns triggered large interest and speculations about the consequences of the pandemic and the adopted countermeasures for fertility too.

The central aims of the project are to investigate short- and mid-term fertility changes in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in developed countries and explore the consequences of the pandemic's impact for fertility trends in the long run. We examined fertility trends observed during and after the pandemic and compared the observed fluctuations to the pre-pandemic period, using the new Short-Term Fertility Fluctuations (STFF) data series incorporated in the Human Fertility Database. The STFF series provides up-to-date data on monthly live births and monthly total fertility rates. Our analyses have demonstrated that the pandemic caused strong swings in birth and fertility trends; these were closely associated with the waves of the pandemic and took place in parallel in most of the countries we analyzed. 

In order to gain a deeper understanding of fertility responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and the causes behind the cross-country parallels and divergences in fertility shifts observable during the pandemic, we also explore the role of selected contextual factors that influence childbearing in times of crisis and uncertainty, including those intrinsic to the COVID-19 pandemic. One of these factors is COVID-19 vaccination. In early 2022, many countries simultaneously experienced another relatively marked fertility downturn. Births that occurred at the turn of the years 2021 and 2022 were linked with conceptions in spring 2021, which coincided with the time when COVID-19 vaccination programs got in full swing. We assess the impact of vaccination on the fertility collapse that occurred in early 2022 in many countries and discuss its potential role from the biological/physiological and the behavioral perspectives.

Publications

Jasilioniene, A.; Jasilionis, D.; Jdanov, D. A.; Myrskylä, M.:

Exploring associations between the Covid-19 vaccination campaign and fertility trends: a population-level analysis for 22 countries

MPIDR Working Paper WP-2024-006. (2024)    

Sobotka, T.; Zeman, K.; Jasilioniene, A.; Winkler-Dworak, M.; Brzozowska, Z.; Alustiza Galarza, A.; Németh, L.; Jdanov, D. A.:

Pandemic roller-coaster? Birth trends in higher-income countries during the COVID-19 pandemic

Population and Development Review, 1–36. (2023)    

Sobotka, T.; Jasilioniene, A.; Alustiza Galarza, A.; Zeman, K.; Németh, L.; Jdanov, D. A.:

Baby bust in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic? First results from the new STFF data series

SocArXiv papers. unpublished. (2021)