“If you’re running for your life, you’re not making babies,” Richard W. One study did find that low-severity storm advisories were associated with a slight uptick in birth rates, but more severe advisories were actually associated with a downturn. But evidence for that is somewhat limited, according to the New York Times. It’s long been a popular assumption that when people are stuck at home with little to do, there’s a spike in pregnancies as a result. The pandemic - and the economic crisis that comes with it - could change a lot of people’s thinking on having kids Overall, when it comes to health care, the pandemic “has really shown our gaps and where we need to be better,” Yeh said. And for people who do get pregnant and deliver during this time, the pandemic could exacerbate racial disparities already found in maternal health care. Meanwhile, some are having difficulty getting birth control because they’ve lost their employer-provided health insurance or because shelter-in-place orders mean they can no longer make a trip to the pharmacy without family members finding out, Flint said. Several states, such as Texas, have moved to restrict abortion, categorizing it as nonessential during this time. “The babies keep coming”: What the coronavirus pandemic means for people giving birthīut the ability to make reproductive choices also isn’t so simple in the pandemic. “People make long-term decisions when they feel certain about the future, and they put off long-term decisions when they don’t,” Philip Cohen, a sociology professor at the University of Maryland who studies families, told Vox. The fact that many child care facilities are currently closed and many people are cut off from their extended families may also discourage some people from planning for kids right now. With millions of Americans newly unemployed and many industries all but shuttered, many families are deeply uncertain about their financial future - if they can even provide for the present. Clinics are reporting an increase in requests for birth control prescriptions, and providers of abortion medication are seeing increased demand as well, according to Nourbese Flint, policy director and manager of reproductive justice programming for the group Black Women for Wellness.Ī lot of the reason may be economic. “We’re not getting any younger.”īut others are making the opposite decision. ![]() In part, the pandemic made them realize that “life is short,” Insley told Vox. But in March, after about two weeks of social distancing, they decided to start trying again. Victoria Insley, for example, told Vox that she and her husband had been trying to conceive but decided to put things on hold after she became unemployed last year. Some say the worldwide crisis has inspired them to try for a child. ![]() But already, just weeks after many Americans were told to stay home, it’s clear that the effect of the pandemic on people’s decisions about children - and their ability to make those decisions - is going to be more complicated than that. Initially, shelter-in-place orders around the country gave rise to jokes about a “coronavirus baby boom” - based in part on research showing that births can spike nine months after certain disasters, especially those that require people to stay inside. But whatever happens, they are just two of the countless many around the country whose reproductive lives have already been impacted by the spread of Covid-19. Yeh is due to follow up with the patient and her partner this week to find out their decision. “They definitely had to weigh their financial strains, which is something they didn’t have to think about a few months ago.” “Talking to them about options counseling has been very different,” Yeh said. Yeh, a family medicine physician in Seattle and a fellow with the group Physicians for Reproductive Health, recently met with them via telemedicine to talk about whether they wanted to continue the pregnancy. Thanks to the economic crisis that has come along with the pandemic, she and her partner are both facing furloughs from their jobs. She ended up going a week without the medication and having an unplanned pregnancy. One of Jaquelyn Yeh’s patients ran out of birth control when the coronavirus pandemic hit.
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