The coronavirus pandemic might have thrown a wrench in pretty much everything ever since it came about, but the one thing people did not expect it to affect was the rate of conceiving. A new study has found that the lockdowns enforced to curb the spread of the virus have not done anything to increase the rise in birth numbers. As per the study, around 80% of the people surveyed for the study did not intend to conceive during the pandemic.
Data was collected from 1,482 interviews conducted online on people who were in lockdown. It was found that nearly 81.9% of these people did not intend to reproduce during the coronavirus pandemic. Yet another 260 participants from the study also said that although they were planning on conceiving before the pandemic, they had now dropped the idea.
The reasons behind these were cited as 'fear of not being economically stable' and 'fear of something going wrong with the pregnancy because of the virus and the pandemic'. The researchers' questionnaires were also able to find that mental wellbeing had an impact on whether or not people wanted to conceive during the pandemic.
“In our study sample, the majority of participants gave significantly higher total scores to their mental wellbeing before the pandemic, while lowest scores were reported in the answers referred to the COVID-19 period,” said Elisabetta Micelli, co-author of the study. Even so, 60% of the participants have continued trying to conceive anyway, while 11.5% have revealed a new desire to become parents and only 4.3% tried to effectively get pregnant during this time.
Well, the scientists say, “it is unknown whether these findings will result in a substantial modification of birth rate in the near future.”
