There are fewer births than there have been in years. What are the reasons?

It is not a fluctuation as happens in statistics. It’s a real kink. A birth kink. A decline that has not been observed since the contraceptive pill became widespread in 1965. It appeared last year and it continues, as the monthly hospital figures already show. Now that the pandemic is really over, fewer children are being born.

That was a real treat for vaccine skeptics. And the question is justified and obvious because the decline in the birth rate followed the year after the corona vaccinations: did the vaccination affect fertility?

Numerous studies have now answered this question. Because it’s quite easy to find out: compare couples who want to have a child and their vaccination status. This happened, for example, in a study by Boston University led by Amelia K. Wesselink, which was published in 2022: 2,126 women participated and also announced the vaccination status of their partners. The result: the vaccinated women did not differ noticeably from the unvaccinated (and if they did, then slightly above the average with a value of 1.08) – and those who suffered from Corona also did not have reduced fertility (1, 07).

This was different in men: while the vaccination had hardly any influence (0.95 instead of 1 in unvaccinated people), this was noticeably lower after a Covid-19 infection: 0.82 for 60 days. Another study from China showed that the semen quality of Covid patients deteriorated (motility -16 percent, sperm count -11 percent) and after six months was only as good as that of the control group. For example, sperm count dropped during the first three months after the disease and then improved again.

An Austrian researcher also has good arguments against the theory that the decline in the birth rate in the past two years is solely due to medical reasons. It was more likely that the couples decided this: Isabella Buber-Ennser expected the decline in the birth rate. At the Institute for Demography of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, people regularly ask about their desire to have children.

In 2021, researchers asked people who wanted to have children if they had changed their family planning because of the pandemic – only 8 percent of women aged 18 to 45 and men aged 18 to 50 who wanted children said at the time that they had changed their wishes altered.

They asked again at the end of 2022. 11 percent said they had changed their plans, while another 19 percent were unsure. “For 30 percent, the crises have changed something, and usually in a negative way: they have postponed having children. But not cancelled,” says Isabella Buber-Ennser. And inflation due to the war in Ukraine was usually cited as the reason, rarely the pandemic. The reasons for the decline in birth rates are likely economic, the demographer says.

The German-Austrian-Swiss demographic meeting in October showed that the curves of all three German-speaking countries were similar.

In 2021 there was a relatively strong increase in the number of births, followed by a decrease.

The three countries share at least one reason for this development: the first year of lockdowns had a positive effect in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. “During the first year of the pandemic, there were more births instead of fewer in countries with good social security or dismissal protection,” says Isabelle Buber-Ennser. And some of the subsequent decline is due to this spike, as couples preferred to have children in 2021 – or more accurately, get pregnant in 2020. But that doesn’t adequately explain the kink in 2022 and 2023.

It is not clear how many couples had to postpone having children, because young women in particular were and are affected by severe Long Covid more often than others. And some couples could have waited to have children out of an abundance of caution after being vaccinated in summer 2021, and men’s fertility fell six months after infection. Most of the population was only infected by the 2021 omicron wave.

It was different in Portugal, Spain and Italy, with waves of violence already in 2020: there, birth rates literally plummeted at the end of 2020, according to another study, also from the Institute of Demography in Vienna, by a research team led by Buber-Ennser’s colleague Tomáš Sobotka shows this clearly. Birth rates in these countries already recovered in 2021 and there was no longer a major dip. So not even after the 2021 vaccination year.

What remains is the financial situation. As mentioned, demographer Buber-Ennser is convinced that economic uncertainty is a major reason for the decline in birth rates – but that it only reached Austria in 2022 with the Ukraine war and associated inflation. And that’s why births in 2023 will be low.

Financial worries actually lead to low birth rates in Europe. See Italy. But does that also apply to Switzerland? Demographers in this country also said that this is exactly the case in times of crisis. In 2022, the worst of the corona pandemic had just passed. Is the war in Ukraine upsetting Swiss couples so much that they postpone having children?

But does that also apply to Switzerland? Here too, demographers said this is exactly the case in times of crisis. In 2022, the worst of the corona pandemic had just passed. And is the war in Ukraine so upsetting Swiss couples that they postpone having children?

In any case, economic uncertainty applies least to Switzerland: unemployment is currently very low, social security is still quite solid and external childcare – an important factor for having children, see France – is constantly being expanded.

Moreover, even the great global economic crisis of 2008 did not result in a decline in the birth rate in Switzerland. Demographer Johanna Probst of the BFS also says that “several crises and uncertainty factors overlap,” but confirms: “We do have economic inflation, but not a bad situation on the labor market.”

What is certainly true in Switzerland, however, are two things: first, psychological stress has increased during the pandemic, as numerous studies have shown, and no improvement is visible yet. François Höpflinger, professor of sociology in Zurich, says: “In the first year of the pandemic, people were still affected, and there was also a political consensus on how to control the pandemic.” In the longer term, however, fears and isolation make you sick.

Along with the deterioration of mental health, stress in the workplace also increased: colleagues were absent due to illness or, as in the nursing sector, quit completely and there is already a shortage of skilled workers. “This was on top of the generally high stress levels in Switzerland,” says Höpflinger. “So people weren’t afraid of losing their jobs – they just had way too much going on to decide to have children now.”

Job changes that could have postponed having children played no role: during the first two pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, the fluctuation in the labor market was slightly lower than normal; in 2022 it increased again, at least among women, but not excessively.

Let’s summarize: firstly, in 2022 and 2023, the increase in the number of births from 2021 was compensated. Secondly, the contagion in Switzerland only occurred in 2021 and had an impact on birth rates in 2022. And thirdly, the high workload due to the pandemic has had a negative effect on Swiss couples’ desire to have children until this year. to get.

And so it happens that in Switzerland currently only 1.4 children are born per woman. This is an absolute low point. Even during World War II, the birth rate only fell to 1.75; since the 1970s it has remained relatively constant between 1.5 and 1.6.

Like Buber-Ennser, Höpflinger thinks the birth rate will still recover. Soon. And it is not the case that the so-called ‘birth strike’, i.e. the fact that more and more couples consciously decide not to have children for environmental reasons, is already visible in the statistics in Europe. (aargauerzeitung.ch)