Historical experience shows that fewer children are born after times of severe global crises. Global pandemics are no exception. After the peak of the Spanish flu in the USA in 1918, 13 percent fewer children were born there the following year. Actually logical: In times of financial uncertainty and fear of the future, many do not want to have a child.
Studies by the University of Bocconi in Milan paint a similar picture for the Covid pandemic: of 22 rich industrial countries, seven – including Italy, Spain and Hungary – experienced a sharp decline in births of up to nine percent. Most other countries – including Germany – were within the statistical error range with a slight increase or decrease. “Baby lull instead of baby boom” was the title of the magazine Scientific American her global corona baby résumé.
And yet there are outliers: countries like Finland and Norway. In the first two quarters of this year, statisticians recorded an astonishing increase in births there – contrary to all expectations. The Finnish population researcher Venla Berg called the numbers “really confusing”. And the Norwegian Institute for Public Health FHI writes in its just published annual report that one sees a “trend that is in stark contrast to previous experiences from health crises”.
The trend is particularly astonishing because the birth rates in Finland and Norway prior to that were in freefall for a decade. They reached their lowest point in 2020. In that year, Norwegian women gave birth to an average of 1.48 children, while Finnish women only gave birth to 1.37 (in Germany it was 1.53 in the same year). The Norwegian statistical office SSB recorded a nationwide increase in births of almost five percent in the first half of 2021 compared to the previous year.
“The timing is perfect.”
Whether this is really a corona effect is not yet known, said demographer Ane Margrete Tømmerås from SSB to the public broadcaster NRK. “But the timing is perfect. The increase started in December 2020.” So exactly nine months after the first lockdown in Norway. The north of the country in particular – a region where many municipalities are struggling with emigration – recorded astonishing numbers. The Lofoten Hospital at times reported twice as many births as in 2020, the Nordland region saw an increase of 20 percent in the first half of the year, Tromsø still had ten percent.
Camilla Stoltenberg, Director of the Public Health Institute, can no longer believe in a coincidence. Your interpretation: Norway’s baby boom testifies to an “impressive confidence”. Unlike in many other countries, the Nordic welfare state made sure that a possible illness or loss of a job did not confront people with existential worries. Finland and Norway also had some of the lowest infection and death rates in Europe due to a consistent corona policy.
“There was the confidence of the Norwegians in the pandemic fight of the authorities,” Stoltenberg told the newspaper Aftenposten, “and a belief that this will turn out well.”