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

Many developed 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 Nordics. In the immediate aftermath of the pandemic (2022-2023), fertility rates resumed their previous downward trend. Most research on the pandemic fertility trends has relied on aggregate data. Although a few studies have examined group-specific trends, they have not covered the post-pandemic years, which is necessary for revealing if any uptick in 2021 left any 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 analyzed further across sociodemographic factors. Our study reveals that the “pandemic pattern” of fertility increase in 2021 and drop in 2022 was confined to subgroups with better possibilities to prepone already intended births. For example, the fertility increase and subsequent drop was particularly evident for mothers with small 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 light of the long-term fertility decline.