The left has always been big on population control, all to save the planet.

No wonder then, that they liked COVID lockdowns, keeping those schools closed and those mask and social distancing requirements in place, long after the danger had passed. 

According to Scientific American:

Early in the COVID pandemic, pundits predicted a baby boom because they believed that people who were forced to stay home to avoid the virus had more time to conceive children. Instead the opposite happened: a baby bust. Yet while the country as a whole saw declines in fertility rates in the pandemic’s first year, a recent study suggests that the rates in some states increased.

The study, which was published in April in Human Reproduction, found that the U.S. fertility rate dropped by 17.5 births per month per 100,000 women of reproductive age after the pandemic’s first wave in early to mid-2020. It then returned to a prepandemic rate of decline following the second wave in the fall and winter of 2020. The states and regions that had the biggest declines in fertility were more likely to have a higher percentage of Democrats and nonwhite residents and more social distancing. In contrast, states with more Republicans, fewer nonwhite residents and less social distancing were more likely to experience fertility increases.

The report states that those blue states with the heaviest lockdown conditions, such as New York and Connecticut, suffered the highest fertility rate percentage losses, while those red states with the fewest restrictions, such as South Dakota, Utah, and Montana, actually saw a rise in fertility, some quite dramatic.

Seems social distancing not only kept people from each other, it also prevented the formation of families.

In other words, the blue-state lefties didn't want to have sex even with each other during lockdowns. Maybe they were wearing masks.

That adds another bad effect to the social ills brought on by enforced social distancing, which up until now, have been learning loss in children, speech loss in toddlers learning to speak, and high suicide rates from depressed and despairing teenagers unable to socialize as they need to do.

Declining fertility rates are always a sign of social decline, leading to lower economic growth rates and disastrous fiscal consequences for pay-as-you-go pensions, as less money goes in than is paid out. In Italy, it has led to empty cities. Nation after nation experiencing population declines have recognized the impending disaster a collapsing birth rate foretells, and struggled to get those numbers back into positive territory, usually to little or no effect. China and Russia have learned the hard way that low population growth, brought on by credulous belief in the claims of low-growth advocates, has a cumulative toxic effect for their nations' futures. China will grow old before it grows rich, and its leaders know it.

The latter two were communist states, of course, with extended exposure to forced birth control and encouraged multiple abortions, and now their decline is unstoppable. 

Lockdowns, though, have had roughly the same effect as communism, with the absence of freedom operative in both cases. It wasn't just being forced to take absurd orders from tyrannical bureaucrats operating on whims. It was the lockdowns themselves, the separation of people from each other, from even their families, from the chance meetings and happy socializations that people apparently need to survive. The state in its all-knowing all-encompassing power effectively atomized people from each other, like solitary confinement, leaving nothing but the state as their companion.

That's why the baby-bust effect is so obviously similar in both the extended examples of totalitarian states and in the temporary conditions of lockdown. People don't want to be fruitful and multiply in any lockdown tyranny conditions.

The blue states put themselves in this situation voluntarily against all evidence, and now, unless they can correct course and move to a free-market model that attracts people to their states, face consequences at election time as congressional seats are redistributed to those states which show human population growth.

They won't make that connection, of course, but the rest of us will -- that lockdowns bring baby busts, not baby booms, because having kids are about living life, and whoever does have the babies eventually owns the land.

Image:  Pixabay / Pixabay License