Laboratory

Demographic Data

At a Glance Projects Publications Team

Project

The Impact 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 several decades. The health threat itself, together with the lockdowns and social restrictions implemented by countries to combat the spread of the virus, had wide-ranging and complex effects on individuals and families. While research on the impact of the pandemic initially focused on COVID-19 morbidity and trends in excess mortality associated with the coronavirus, there has also been substantial interest in examining the consequences of the pandemic for fertility.

The central aims of the project are to investigate short- and medium-term changes in fertility in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in developed countries, and to explore the long-term consequences of the pandemic for fertility trends. We examine fertility trends during and after the pandemic, and compare the observed fluctuations to the pre-pandemic period using the Short-Term Fertility Fluctuations (STFF) data series included in the Human Fertility Database. The STFF series provides up-to-date data on monthly live births and monthly total fertility rates. Our analyses demonstrate that the pandemic caused strong swings in birth and fertility trends, and that these swings 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 the fertility responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and the underlying causes of the cross-country parallels and divergences in fertility shifts during the pandemic, we also explore the role of selected contextual factors that may 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 were 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 biological/physiological and behavioral perspectives.

Publications

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

Association between the COVID-19 vaccination campaign and fertility trends: a population-level time series analysis for 22 countries

BMJ Public Health 3:1, 1–8. (2025)    

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 50:S1, 23–58. (2024)    

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)