baby bust

Turns out a global pandemic isn’t the baby-making incentive many people thought it would be.

New data shows an even steeper drop in American birth rates than NBCLX first discovered last month, as new data – from the tenth and eleventh months of the pandemic – is made public.

Not even locking couples up and obliterating their social calendars could convince more Americans to have babies, as our quarantine-inspired baby boom has failed to materialize.

When pandemic lockdowns forced people inside in early 2020, there was lots of speculation that all those bored couples would create a baby boom. Instead, 2020 appears to be the year of the baby bust. NBCLX’s Noah Pransky investigates why we’ve stopped having babies — and what that that means for our future.