Not a boom, but a baby bust: Birth rates decline precipitously for 2020

Locked down last spring with most businesses closed and the world flipped on its head, there wasn't much to do except Netflix and chill. And make babies. Or at least that was the joke — the punchline never came. Instead, Ohio saw a steep drop in births through 2020, down 5,467 from the year before, according to the state health department. Weekly tallies show just about 11,300 births to date in 2021, a far cry from the big baby boom everyone expected. "I think we all had that initial thought process when all this started. … 'Oh my goodness, what is December of 2020 and January of 2021 going to look like?'" said Dr. Ellie Ragsdale, an obstetrician and director of fetal intervention for University Hospitals. Most OB-GYNs brace for a wave of births nine months after Christmas and Valentine's Day each year, she said. They were ready to do the same after the quarantine. "But I think the overwhelming fear and uncertainty of COVID, plus the financial constraints that people were under when they lost their jobs, and they were home. … I think that sort of put a damper on things," Ragsdale said. Birthrates always go down during disasters, said Greggor Mattson, associate professor of sociology at Oberlin College. It happened during the 1918 Spanish flu, the Great Depression and the Great Recession, so a bust due to COVID-19 is no surprise, he said. The Brookings Institution, a public policy nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., backed up that assessment. In December, it predicted a nationwide decline in births by between 300,000 and 500,000 due to the virus. Pandemic babies, blizzard babies, power outage babies — all are popular myths that have been disproved, the organization said. Even before the pandemic started, birthrates were declining, Mattson said. People were reporting lower rates of unwanted pregnancy, saying they would hold off on having children and delay marriage. Ohio's numbers bear that out. The state's birthrate has been on a slow decline for at least 15 years, and despite surging up an odd year or two it's always sunk down again. The trend holds true in Lorain County as well. There were 3,666 births here back in 2006, and last year there were just 3,193, a slope downward of nearly 500 per year. Lockdowns in the spring and summer didn't change anything about the underlying reasons people have been choosing not to have children, Mattson said. Rather, circumstances reinforced their decisions. "People thought just because couples were cooped up, that they would be having more sex," he said. "What they didn't think is most of us are cooped up with other people," from older kids to parents to grandparents all riding out the storm under one roof. Ragsdale, who specializes in high-risk and complicated pregnancies, said she's talked to plenty of patients who have decided it's just not the right time to have kids. Others, facing hard decisions about having children with birth defects, chose to terminate their pregnancies, she said. She believes many were alarmed at the idea of having babies that would need intense care, often separated from their parents, while hospitals are under COVID-19 visitation restrictions. Mattson said technology has provided an incredible insight into how people felt about sex and having children during the pandemic. He pointed to the research of University of Maryland sociologist Philip Cohen, who has extensively studied trends in Google search terms. Throughout 2020, searches about wedding planning, pregnancy advice, sex health and other related keywords all dropped off steeply. Meanwhile, Mercy Health Lorain Hospital appears to be an outlier. It saw a 15 percent uptick in births over the past year, according to Erin Henry, director of women's services. She said 770 babies were delivered at the hospital in 2020, and Mercy isn't expecting that trend to reverse anytime soon. She disagreed with Mattson's analysis, and predicted there will be a nationwide surge in births in the next few months. "Usually you can look back 10 months and see, 'Oh, we had a big snowstorm,' or there's another significant event that when you're crazy busy you can look back and relate it to what was happening 10 months ago," Henry said. Mercy has been trying to grow its birthing services, and so far that strategy is succeeding, she said. Henry also believes it's too early to attribute the bump to the closure of birthing suites at University Hospitals Elyria Medical Center. Ragsdale isn't as optimistic that the birthrate will suddenly reverse. She said it could happen, though, with an explosion of economic growth in Northeast Ohio. Jobs that are attractive to young families would go a long way toward another baby boom. Contact Jason Hawk at (440) 329-7122 or news@lcnewspapers.com.