Swedish Fertility Developments Before, During and After the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Many affluent societies saw a temporary increase in their fertility rates in 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic. This included a number of countries that had experienced fertility decline during the 2010s, like the Nordic. In the immediate aftermath of the pandemic (2022-2023), fertility rates resumed their previous downward trend. Most research on the pandemic-related fertility trends has relied on aggregate data. Although a few studies have examined group-specific trends, hardly any have covered the post-pandemic years-an important step for revealing whether any uptick in 2021 had a lasting impact on fertility structures. Our study attends to this objective, with a focus on parity and group-specific fertility trends in Sweden before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. We apply event-history techniques to Swedish register data to unveil annual trends of birth risks in 2010-2022, for all Swedish-born women of childbearing age. First- and second-birth risks in 2015-2022 are analysed further across socio-demographic factors. Our study reveals that the "pandemic pattern" of fertility increase in 2021 and drop in 2022 was visible among subgroups with better possibilities to prepone already intended births. For example, the fertility increase and subsequent drop was particularly evident for mothers with young children and women with higher education and incomes. The pandemic fertility pattern reflects temporary changes in the timing of childbearing, more specifically a preponement of births that occurred in 2021 with resulting shortfall in 2022. The continued fall in fertility rates in 2023 should be viewed in the light of the long-term fertility decline.

Keywords: COVID-19; Fertility; Fertility trends; Pandemic; Sweden.

Fig. 1

Total fertility rates of the nordic countries 2000–2023. Source Nordic Statistical Central Bureaus

Fig. 2

Relative birth risks by parity across calendar years 2010–2022. Separate models for first and higher-order births. For parities 2–4, birth order is interacted with calendar year. Swedish-born women. First-birth risks are standardised by age, with the year 2020 as reference category. Higher-order births are standardised by age group and time since last birth, with reference category second births in 2020

Fig. 3

Relative first-birth risks by age groups across calendar years 2010–2022. Interaction of age group and calendar year. Swedish-born women. Reference category is ages 35–39 in the year 2020

Fig. 4

Relative second-birth risks by time since last birth and calendar years. Interaction of time since last birth and calendar year. Swedish-born women. Reference category is 12–17 months in the year 2020. Standardised by age of woman. In order to increase readability, we do not include the years 2015–2018, but they are nearly identical to 2019 and 2020

Fig. 5

Relative first- and second-birth risks by regions across calendar years. Interaction between region and calendar year. Swedish-born women. First and second births modelled separately. Reference category medium towns in 2020. First births standardised by age of woman, and second births standardised by age of woman and time since last birth

Fig. 6

Relative first- and second-birth risks by labour-market activity across calendar years. Interaction between labour-market activity and calendar year. Swedish-born women. First and second births modelled separately. Reference category medium income in 2020. First births standardised by age of woman, and second births standardised by age of woman and time since last birth

Fig. 7

Total Fertility Rates of selected European countries 2012–2022. Countries are included in the figure if they are represented in the Eurostat TFR data for all years 2012–2022, and have at least 1 million inhabitants. Potential break in time series in any of the years 2019–2022 reported for Czechia 2020, Hungary 2022, Italy 2019, Poland 2022 and Serbia 2022 Source Eurostat,

Fig. 8

Relative first- and second-birth risks by (parental) migration background across calendar years. Interaction between migration background and calendar year. Swedish-born women. First and second births modelled separately. Reference category Swedish-born, 2020. First births standardised by age of woman, and second births standardised by age of woman and time since last birth

Fig. 9

Relative first- and second-birth risks by education across calendar years. Interaction between education and calendar year. Swedish-born women. First and second births modelled separately. Reference category secondary education in 2020. First births standardised by age of woman and second births standardised by age of woman and time since last birth

Fig. 10

Relative birth risks across subgroups, with 2020 as reference category for each subgroup, based on models presented above

Fig. 10

Relative birth risks across subgroups, with 2020 as reference category for each subgroup, based on models presented above