Declining Quantity and Quality of Births in Chile amidst the COVID‐19 Pandemic

Abstract

Extensive demographic scholarship shows that the population‐level implications of mortality crises such as the COVID‐19 pandemic extend beyond mortality dynamics to affect fertility and family‐formation strategies. Using novel municipality‐level data from Chile covering all births that occurred between January 2017 and December 2021, this study explores trends in fertility and implications of the COVID‐19 pandemic for “quantum” and “quality” of births in the Chilean context. Building both a monthly and a yearly panel of 346 municipalities and leveraging fixed‐effects regression analyses, we focus on births and crude birth rates to measure quantum, while quality is assessed through the share of births that are low‐weight (LBW) and preterm (PTB). Our findings provide evidence of a significant drop in fertility in the wake of COVID—of the magnitude of a reduction of 1.3 live births per 1,000 individuals—which reaches a minimum around February 2021, followed by an incipient rebound in late 2021. Moreover, estimates on child health at birth suggest that the COVID period was associated with an increase in LBW and, foremost, PTB, by 1 and 2.2 percentage points, respectively. Findings from this study shed light on the role of policy interventions in the health arena and the linkages between short‐ and long‐run effects in relation to the various COVID‐19 waves in Chile.

Fertility and Family Dynamics in the Aftermath of the COVID‐19 Pandemic

“…Finally, moving beyond the number of births alone, this volume presents evidence that heterogeneity also occurred in birth outcomes during the early stages of the pandemic. While the birthrate in both Spain and Chile declined below what would have been expected, in Chile these declines were accompanied by an increase in low-birthweight and preterm births (Pesando and Abufhele 2023). The opposite holds for Spain, where the declines went hand in hand with an "improvement" in birth outcomes (Cozzani et al 2023).…”

Diverging reproductive outcomes by maternal education during the Covid‐19 pandemic across Brazilian and Colombian regions

“…On the one hand, many pathways can lead to a decline in fertility. While the worsening of morbidity that affects maternal mortality, miscarriages, fecundity, or sexual activity (Karimi et al, 2021; Seymen, 2021) might not be extensive, the indirect consequences of social isolation, lockdowns, stress, and uncertainty can affect the number of conceptions (Pesando & Abufhele, 2023). The psychological and economic impact of the death of a loved one or close kin can increase the feeling of uncertainty and reinforce this mechanism, especially when the person who died is the breadwinner in disadvantaged families (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, 2022b).…”

“…These effects are proving profound, comprehensive, and likely to last decades (Jatrana et al, 2022). Since the start of the pandemic, demographers have highlighted the importance of considering the impacts of Covid‐19 not only on mortality but also on fertility (Aassve et al, 2020; Pesando & Abufhele, 2023; Sobotka et al, 2021), fertility intentions (Emery & Koops, 2022; Lindberg et al, 2020; Luppi et al, 2020), and migration (Ferris & Sorrell, 2021; Guadagno, 2020). Researchers have also described the impact of the pandemic on other dimensions of demographic change, including household composition, population aging, territorial distribution, and kinship networks (Verdery et al, 2020).…”

“…Existing research often assumes that the pandemic's impact on reproductive patterns is uniform due to the severity of the crisis. 1 In addition, the countries with the most significant socioeconomic disparities have lagged in providing timely assessments of the consequences of the pandemic, despite institutional efforts to assist them in collecting this information (Binstock et al, 2021;Pesando & Abufhele, 2023). Because of inequalities in data availability and quality across countries and subpopulations, the influence of the Covid-19 pandemic on population dynamics is better understood in high-income countries.…”

Changes in conception rates, not in pregnancy‐related behaviour, likely caused decline in preterm births during the first year of the COVID‐19 pandemic

“…5,10 More advantaged parental socio-economic circumstances, in turn, have consistently been shown to be associated with a lower probability of preterm birth. 11 Pandemic-induced compositional shifts in parental characteristics provide us with another plausible explanation for improved birth outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Global North, whereas the situation in countries with less universal access to contraceptive measures may have seen different developments, as suggested by Pesando & Abufhele 12 for Chile.…”