The pandemic and the family, demography edition (video)

I think the big demographic story of 2021 is likely to be the very large decline in births. I think everything points that way and I think it’s going to be quite shocking when we see how big it is. — Philip Cohen, October 27, 2020

I gave a talk yesterday at the University of California, Irvine Center for Demographic and Social Analysis. The slides are here under CC-BY license. The video is below.

After reviewing the state of the economic and social shock of the pandemic, with implications for family processes and events (sex, contraception, pregnancy, birth, marriage, and divorce), I presented some new information on births and marriage.

Here is the data on births, in Florida and California, the only states I found that have monthly updated birth numbers through September (subject to revision, but probably not by much). Both show large declines in births in 2020. Which seems hard to link to the pandemic, gestation times being what they are (but maybe more reasonable than last month’s report). There may already be more miscarriages and abortions, or maybe fewer premature births? I don’t know. If these declines have nothing to do with the pandemic, and they’re just the continuation of our trend toward lower birth rates, then that’s pretty shocking, too.

This is the total births by month and year, with 2018 and 2019 compared with 2020 so far:

Here are the monthly totals compared with the annual average decline in over the previous three years, which is 2.9% in California and 0.7% in Florida, which I call “predicted.”

In September 2020 versus September 2019, births were 6.1% lower in Florida and 9.6% lower in California. There is a lot of big news in the news these days, but I think this is still pretty big news. Again, if this has nothing to do with the pandemic that’s even more shocking.

Anyway, here’s the video: