A baby bust sweeping the world should be enough to set alarm bells ringing

If this were just a short-term dip, the overall economic impact would be limited. But it isn’t short term. Before Covid, births were depressed across the developed world

During the past year, living in the shadow of Covid, I have been completing a book on the big global trends in population. This forced me to ask – what effect will the pandemic have on birth rates? There are countless factors to consider.

On the one hand, with more time at home and fewer distractions, we might expect there to be a baby boom. On the other, with couples under each other’s feet from dawn to dusk, sexual attraction may be waning. Delayed weddings, a lack of dating opportunities and a shortage of contraception in the developing world will all be taking their toll in various ways, too.

Then there is the fear factor. With the pandemic raging, women don’t necessarily want to get into a situation in which they will end up in a hospital, where the chance of picking up an infection is high. We now know that a woman of child-bearing age is unlikely to get seriously ill from Covid, and the chance of her passing on any infection to a foetus is probably zero – but that was not clear at the start of the pandemic and might have had the effect of putting some couples off procreation. Economic uncertainty and job insecurity compound the fear.

Overall, in more developed countries like Britain, the data shows that the net impact of these various factors has been a sharp drop in birth rates. Surveys of couples during the early days of the pandemic suggested that many were abandoning plans to start or grow a family, both in the short term and permanently. Meanwhile, early data suggests that the number of children born in the US this year will fall by at least half a million. In continental Europe, the picture is worse: in France, it looks like births are down 13 per cent, in Italy and Spain, 20 per cent.

If this were just a short-term dip, the overall economic impact would be limited. But it isn’t short term. Before anyone had heard of Covid, births were depressed across the developed world. Fertility rates in North America and Japan have been below replacement level for decades, and sinking. Even the better performers among the rich countries – the US, the UK, France and Scandinavia – were already set for steady population decline, mitigated only by ever higher levels of immigration. And small family syndrome is catching. The end of the One Child Policy has done little or nothing to increase childbearing in China; an increasingly educated and urban population, focused on material advancement and now long accustomed to small family size, has no interest in taking up the increased rations in family size now permitted to them by the Communist Party.

For many rich countries, it is not just about placing personal finance above the desire to start a family. There is increasing evidence that some people are not having children because of environmental concerns, either because they don’t want to bring children into a world hurtling towards a climate catastrophe, or because they don’t want to create another consumer who will make his or her contribution towards trashing the planet.

Both of these concerns are thoroughly misguided. With fantastic advances in technology from food production to fuel, there is no reason why families of two or three children should not be consistent with stopping and reversing environmental damage.

The babies now being born are the ones who will solve the problems of the mid-21st century. They are more likely to be able to do so in developed countries like Britain or Japan where they will have access to education. And as for concern about bringing children into such a wicked world, which of us would have been born if our parents and grandparents had taken that attitude? My generation was conceived despite the threat of the Cold War and nuclear calamity. My parents were born in interwar years of rising totalitarianism and economic depression. The world today has never been richer, better fed and better able to care for its newborns, which is why, globally, the infant mortality rate is half what it was as recently as the Nineties and still falling fast.

There is only one developed country where the fertility rate is above replacement level – indeed, well above replacement level: Israel, whose citizens, both Arab and Jewish, have three children per woman. Despite its small size and limited natural resources, this pro-natal society has the confidence and vision to replace itself and grow. Is it coincidence that this is also the country leading the world out of the pandemic through a vaccination programme which is streets ahead of anywhere else? It seems more likely that both facts stem from a culture in which, when clinking glasses, people do not say “cheers” or “prost” but “l’chaim” – to life!