Broadly, provisional data from the Office for National Statistics suggests there was a temporary decline in babies conceived during the first three months of the first lockdown in 2020, but then the fertility rate rebounded to levels above those seen in previous years. Let's take a closer look.

The earliest we would have expected COVID to affect people's decisions to become pregnant would have been February 2020, influencing births on average from November 2020.

In the graph below, the number of monthly births are plotted for the years 2018-21 in Scotland, England and Wales, and Northern Ireland. You can see that before the pandemic, the number of births had been falling in all countries of the UK.

By 2019, the average fertility rate for Scotland was 1.37 births per woman. This was the lowest level ever recorded and was significantly lower than the level in 2008 (around 1.77) before the effects of the economic recession hit.

In 2019, fertility rates were slightly higher in England and Wales (1.65) and Northern Ireland (1.82) than in Scotland, but again, these levels were some of the lowest ever recorded.