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Births in Chile suffered a drop of 18.89 percent in January and February, compared to the same period in 2020, that is, about nine months after the first confinement imposed to contain the escalation of the coronavirus epidemic.
In the first two months of 2021, 27,631 children -the lowest number of births in the last 10 years for those dates-, a figure that last year was 34,065, according to the Civil Registry data published by the newspaper The Thirda.
According to specialists, it is a direct effect of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We had historical experiences that suggested that this drop in fertility could occur”said the academic from the Catholic University Viviana Salinas, Doctor in Sociology, with a specialization in Demography from the University of Texas, on the rotary.
According to the expert, historically, events that imply an increase in mortality, such as pandemics or wars, have been followed by drops in fertility, which after a few years recover.
However, according to Third, in the case of Covid-19 specialists foreshadowed an opposite effect, given that quarantines would force couples to spend more time together, which, added to the inability or fear of attending health centers to access contraceptives, could have caused fertility to increase.
“It’s super interesting to wonder what happened to access and use of contraceptives in the pandemicIn practice, we see that the increase in fertility did not occur, “said Salinas.
For his part, the sociologist Jose Olavarría, Doctor of Social Sciences and academic from the U. Academia de Humanismo Cristiano, assured that several theories are being considered, but the uncertainty caused by the emergency is one of the most important points: “The virus is an uncontrollable agent for people”, he warned.
Along these lines, Salinas argued that the economic slowdown that caused the pandemic, added to the job instability they are a factor in questioning “when to have them (to expect) or how many”.
While, Carolina Stefoni, Associate researcher at the Center for Conflict and Social Cohesion Studies (COES) and an academic at the Universidad Mayor, affirmed that, in the general panorama, there is a sustained drop in births and the epidemic only increased that trend.
“After the World War there was a baby boom, but in a pandemic it is different, it is part of another long-term scenario, it is a different context, of greater instability and precariousness in the environment,” he said.
