We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US

> adds to the stress and uncertainties of delivery and postnatal care

Another lurking factor is the availability of grandparents to assume some of the early child care. Movement restrictions can remove this assistance entirely from new parents.

> but the impeding of breathing from wearing a mask is minimal.

If I inhale hard on a surgical mask, it collapses and seals against my mouth. I have to either use a brand new, very stiff, mask. Or adjust the mask not to seal well against the sides to add some more space between my mouth and the mask.

It doesn't happen during normal breathing, but I could easily see it happening during labor - the sweat would soften the mask, and the level of breathing needed would easily do it.

This mostly makes sense if real estate is already fully utilised, but it isn't.

I can't speak to India, but there's a feeling broadly in North America of having "new development" and "expansion" over time. Cities are much, much larger now than they were 40 years ago, and people imagine that the new farm land subsumed and developed should be available for a similar price relative to income to what it was 'back then'.

The XXX-acre rural farmland wasn't as valuable as the same space in town when purchased as a lot, but now it holds as many homes as that downtown space used to. Is it worth the same today, relatively, as that space was then? No, they're both worth comparatively way, way more than they were.

I don't mean to suggest that scarcity isn't a part of the equation here, more that there are a lot complex factors involved, e.g. wage levels relative to inflation over time.

Given that good jobs remained in the city center, and commutes are not faster than they used to be, the point is not very relevant.

Birth rates have a much larger effect on society than I think people realize. I recently read Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? by Eric Kaufmann. It makes a pretty strong argument that contrary to the widespread assumption that everyone will just become an atheist, the world will actually become more religious, almost entirely because of birth rates.

In this 2010 book, Kaufmann argued that the answer to the question raised in the title is in the affirmative because demographic realities pose real challenges to the assumption of the inevitability of secular and liberal progress. He observed that devout factions tend to have a significant fertility advantage over their more moderate counterparts and the non-religious. For instance, white Catholic women in France have on average half a child more than their white secular counterparts while the Amish in the United States have three to four times more children than their fellow Christians on average. Highly religious groups tend to isolate themselves from the secularizing effects of modern mainstream Western society, making it more likely that the children will retain their parents' faiths. At the same time, secular people generally have rather low fertility rates by comparison for a variety of reasons, such as materialism, individualism, the preference for the here and now, feminism, environmentalism, or general pessimism. Kaufmann projected that secularism will have a mixed future in Europe. It will remain strong in most Catholic countries, notably Ireland and Spain, but has essentially ground to a halt in Protestant Europe and in France, and will falter in Northwestern Europe by mid-century. He told Mercator Net that the only way to buckle the trend involves "a creed that touches the emotional registers", which "can lure away the children of fundamentalists" and "a repudiation of multiculturalism." He suggested that "secular nationalism" and moderate religion associated with the nation-state could be part of the mix, but these traditions have been losing support at a considerable rate.

He observed that moderate faith of the Abrahamic variety is under pressure from both secularists and fundamentalists as they find themselves living in the secularizing societies of the West.[13] If it were only true that the religious were having more children than secular people, Kaufmann argues that the effects of the incoming demographic transformation would only be national, but because those who are having the most children tend to be intensely religious, he predicted that there would also be ramifications for international relations. However, Kaufmann rejected the increasingly popular notion that Islam will become the dominant religion in Europe by the end of the twenty-first century. Rather, Muslims would stabilize at around a fifth of the European population by 2100.