COVID-19 Has Caused Fewer Babies Being Born & That Has Serious Repercussions

When people are getting laid off left and right; when the economy is looking grim and uncertain, with potentially a recession looming in the horizon; when having to constantly be around your significant other due to working from home turns love into bitter arguments and potentially even divorces and break-ups, it’s no wonder many couples aren’t really in the mood to have any babies.

It’s just simple maths and common sense really.

After all, every parent wants to be able to give the best to their child, and when they think they couldn’t do that due to one major factor or the other, then they won’t have a child at that time.

High Death Toll and Plunging Birth Rates

With more than 2.5 million deaths within just the span of slightly over a year, COVID-19 has a pretty devastating impact on the global population.

However, what many people didn’t realise is that along with the high death toll, COVID-19 has also contributed to a massive plunge in birth rates all around the world.

A plunge that is huge enough to affect the future economy of a country, especially for countries with aging populations like Italy, South Korea, Japan, and yes, of course Singapore.

In fact, Statistics Korea has just recently revealed that South Korea’s fertility rate is the lowest in the world in 2020, dropping from an already low 0.92 in 2019 to just 0.84.

France has also reported its lowest birth rate since World War II, Taiwan’s fertility rate dropped below 1 child per woman for the first time, and in China, there is a 15% reduction in the number of registrations for newborns in 2020. Japan recorded the fewest newborns registered in 2020 as well.

Heck, in Singapore, the birth rate, which has been in a slow but steady decline over the years, currently stands at only 8.502 births per 1,000 people.

A Looming Global Population Crisis

You may now be wondering, “Aiya… why should I care whether people are having babies or not? How does that affect ME or my family?”

Well, you should because demographics and economy are linked in ways that you may not expect.

For instance, governments worldwide have accumulated huge amounts of borrowed money just so they could fuel the growth of their respective economies.

This system works as long as there is a constant, and hopefully increasing, supply of future taxpayers to support that debt.

That’s not including the other money-crunching social welfare programs that prop up a country’s society as a whole, such as the public pension system.

Without enough adults joining the workforce and paying their taxes, many society-benefiting programs would have to be slashed, and the fallout from that would be devastating to the people as many more would fall into poverty and the widening gap between the rich and the poor would accelerate even further.

And as the saying goes, bad news comes in threes, and naturally, debt and slashed social programs are only the tip of the iceberg.

There’s still that scary recession that’s looming in the horizon.

According to HSBC Holdings economist James Pomeroy, “The longer and more severe the recession, the steeper the fall in birth rates, and the more likely it is that a fall in birth rates becomes a permanent change in family planning.”

If the forecasts are true, “it’s going to lower potential growth rates and it makes high levels of debt less sustainable in the long term.”

Based on his calculations, he predicts that there will be a reduction of 10-15% in the workforce within just 2 decades, and that the global population will start shrinking as soon as 2050.

Will Babies Make a Come Back After the Virus has been Tamed?

Even if the world finally has a handle on the COVID-19 pandemic and the economies of the world eventually recovered, it’s still unlikely that it’ll start raining babies again.

This is evident in the global fertility statistics which noted a steady drop in fertility rates across all major economies for decades.

Plus, the damage COVID-19 has wrought on people in their optimal childbearing ages might be too late to undo.

Research by the Guttmacher Institute found the pandemic led more than 40% of women in the US to change plans about when to have children or how many to have.

Lockdowns have also caused spikes in divorce and break-up rates, and prevented new relationships to form or flourish, all of which are important precursors to pregnancies and the formation of new families.

In Singapore, new marriage registrations dropped by 5.8% in 2019 while the divorce rate increased by 3.8% according to the Singapore Department of Statistics (SingStat).

Although the 2020 version of the statistics isn’t out yet, it’s not unreasonable to predict that this trend would continue, or even worsen, in 2020 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, unlike the economy, lower fertility isn’t a problem that’s easy to fix.

According to Tomas Sobotka, a fertility expert at the Vienna Institute of Demography in Austria, some births may end up not occurring “because the window for postponement is narrowing down.”

He added, “Many women and men who plan to have a baby in the future are now in their late 30s or early 40s, and likely to face infertility when trying to have a child later.”

Time waits for no one… even when it comes to having a kid.

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