Arrow-right Camera
The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Study: Recessions can postpone motherhood forever

Associated Press

NEW YORK – When the economy tanks, women have fewer babies. But what happens in the following years, when conditions improve?

A massive new study suggests that for some U.S. women, living through a recession can mean they will never have children.

In fact, the authors project that among women who were in their early 20s in 2008 – early in the Great Recession – about 151,000 will forgo having any children as a result, at least by age 40.

Overall, the lingering impact of that recession may ultimately mean about 427,000 fewer children being born over the course of a couple decades, the authors say.

On a societal level these effects are small. The drop-off in births isn’t much for a nation that produces about 4 million babies a year.

But the results still show “a pretty profound effect on some women’s lives,” said study author Janet Currie, a health economist at Princeton University.

Currie and colleague Hannes Schwandt’s paper was released Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

Past studies generally have shown women cut back on having babies when unemployment rises.

For the new study, researchers used birth records and census data to track the reproductive histories up to age 40 for every woman born in the U.S. from 1961 to 1970. To look for an effect from the economy, researchers compared the timing of when babies were conceived to unemployment levels at that time.

They looked for evidence that women who defer having children during tough times make up for it later on, ending up with the same number they would have had otherwise.

“We were just trying to measure how much catch-up there was,” Currie said in a telephone interview. When the research showed a shortfall for women who experience those tough times at ages 20 to 24, “we were surprised.”

No long-term effect on childbearing appeared for women of other ages.