Epidemics, pandemics and fertility change: responses to Zika and COVID-19 in Singapore

ABSTRACT

Using longitudinal surveys on married Singaporean women of childbearing ages, we compared self-reported changes to fertility plans among 407 and 345 respondents after the 2016–2017 Zika and 2020 COVID-19 outbreaks, respectively. Zika associated with intentions to delay but not reduce childbearing, while COVID-19 was associated with both. Some women reported accelerating and increasing childbearing during COVID-19, with more intending to bring forward births as the pandemic persisted. Education was more predictive of changes in fertility plans during the pandemic compared to the Zika epidemic, and women who delayed childbearing due to Zika were more likely to further adjust timing of childbearing during COVID-19. We considered three possible explanations for changes to fertility plans: fear of infection, change in subjective wellbeing, and income loss, and find stronger effects of perceptions of the virus on downward revisions of fertility plans after the Zika epidemic but a larger role for stress and income loss during the pandemic, reflecting the latter’s wider economic and social impacts.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• Zika
• fertility
• infection
• income loss
• subjective wellbeing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The survey data collected and used in this paper are available upon reasonable request from the authors.

Ethics approval

The survey study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at the National University of Singapore [N-17-048].

Permission to reproduce material from other sources

All the secondary data used in the present study have been retrieved from publicly accessible sources.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore [grant numbers R-603-000-237-133, R-603-000-190-133, and R-603-000-347-115].