Unpacking the post-COVID association between unexpected births and excess deaths

The association between unexpected births and excess deaths this decade is largely spurious because lower wealth and poor previous health outcomes drove excess deaths, while the opportunity cost of childbearing has accelerated declining births in wealthier countries post-COVID. Better understanding population effects of the pandemic is of broad social and economic interest given declining fertility rates; and change in trajectory of births could prove the pandemic's most serious socio-economic consequences.