Pregnant pause

SHELBY PARKER PLANNED TO GET PREGNANT this year. The timing seemed right: She was working as a middle-school teacher in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, a job that provided benefits for her whole family. Her husband, who drives a truck for FedEx, had just gotten a promotion. Their 21-month-old daughter was nearly ready for preschool.

Now Parker, 29, is contemplating not trying for a second child at all. The state, deprived of tax revenues because of business closures resulting from the coronavirus, cut public-school funding by $300 million. The school has warned teachers that there may be a round of layoffs before the end of the year. As the pandemic rages on, Parker and her husband worry that she could end up out of work. If that happens, they’ll be left without health insurance.

If things were different—if Parker had confidence in the economy, in her chances of avoiding exposure to the coronavirus on the days she teaches in person, in the government’s ability to control the spread of the virus—she’d be pregnant already. “I’m grieving for the family I thought I would have,” she says.

Economists and fertility experts say hundreds of thousands of American women are making the same decision. A June report from the Brookings Institution estimated that the U.S. would see as many as 500,000 fewer births in 2021, a 13% drop from the 3.8 million babies born in 2019. Telehealth clinic Nurx has seen a 50% jump in requests for birth control since the beginning of the pandemic and a 40% increase in requests for Plan B. A survey from the Guttmacher Institute found that 34% of sexually active women in the U.S. have decided either to delay getting pregnant or to have