Changes in conception rates, not in pregnancy related behavior, likely caused decline in pre-term births during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

A series of studies, including recent work published in BJOG by Rusconi et al., has highlighted the surprising fact that measures of birth outcomes such as pre-term birth and low birth weight improved nine months after the first wave (February-June 2020) of the COVID-19 pandemic across countries such as Italy, Spain, Ireland, and the United States (see Yang et al. for recent meta study). This growing body of work has generated important knowledge on the children conceived and born during the pandemic, and how they as a cohort may differ from those born before and after the pandemic. Yet, we believe that this strand of literature has overlooked key demographic drivers behind the changes in birth outcomes observed during the pandemic. Here we describe why an improvement in birth outcomes observed during the pandemic is likely caused by decline in conception rate and changing selection into conception in the months following the onset of the pandemic rather than changing behaviors among pregnant women during the pandemic.

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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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DOI

https://doi.org/10.1111/1471-0528.17568

Repository URI

https://eprints.gla.ac.uk/299214/