#Women are reconsidering having kids due to the coronavirus

Despite many people being stuck at home with their partners as a result of the pandemic, the coronavirus is causing the opposite of a baby boom, new research has found.

Roughly a third of women want fewer children and are delaying getting pregnant as a result of COVID-19, according to a recent survey by the reproductive health research organization the Guttmacher Institute. In a survey of more than 2,000 cisgender women aged 18-49, over 40% said they had changed their plans regarding when and how many children to have as a direct result of the pandemic.

“In contrast, 17% of women wanted to have a child sooner or wanted to have more children because of the coronavirus pandemic,” wrote report authors.

The changing preferences in family planning follow not just the lethal disease’s global spread, but also the economic fallout and record unemployment rates — factors that do not make women hopeful for the future.

“Pandemic-related worries about finances and job stability, as well as general unease about the future, may be shifting how women feel about having children,” the authors wrote.

Minority groups, those in less stable financial standing and queer women were the most impacted by the pandemic in terms of their childbearing goals. Hispanic, black and queer women and those with household incomes below the federal poverty level said they wanted fewer children or were delaying pregnancy at higher rates than their white, heterosexual and wealthier counterparts.

“Given that economic hardship and uncertainty negatively affect fertility intentions, it is also not a surprise that black, Hispanic and low-income women are more likely to report these changes, as those groups have been hardest-hit by the pandemic,” University of Notre Dame economics professor Kasey Buckles told Quartz.

“These broad comparisons by sexual orientation might be disguising the fact that economic challenges are also making certain parts of the queer community less likely to have kids because they can’t afford to get pregnant or raise kids,” said University of Massachusetts Amherst economist Lee Badgett.

Significantly, as a result of these changes, some reports have predicted that American births could fall by half a million in 2021.

The negative impact on childbearing is historically consistent: During the 2008 Great Recession, women also reported a lessened desire to have kids, putting national fertility rates into a decline.