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  2022-06-17

  The Pandemic ‘Baby Bust’ and Rebound

  This is a news story from National Academics by Sara Frueh. It goes over the data of births throughout the pandemic. Melissa Kearney, a professor of economics at the University of Maryland, says that there was this idea at the beginning of the pandemic that it would lead to a baby boom with people being forced to stay home, but it did not. She adds that closed or limited facilities at the height of the pandemic maybe impacted some people. To support the claim, she brings up the pandemic from 1918-1919 and how that also led to decreased birth rates. An analysis of the data from Kearney states there were 62,000 fewer conceptions in the years from 2020-2021. There was a small increase in conception rates in the summer of 2020, but fell into decline again soon afterwards. The overall trend that Kearney sees with the birth and conception rates is that is has been a steady decline after COVID.
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  2020-04-09

  During coronavirus crisis, Congress’s first caucus for nonreligious belief seeks a larger role in promoting science

  "The nation is growing increasingly nonreligious. Last year, the Pew Research Center reported that 26 percent of Americans now say they are not affiliated with any religious tradition, compared with 17 percent in 2009. Many of those unaffiliated Americans still believe in God and incorporate spiritual practices into their lives. But the share of atheists has doubled, from 2 percent of Americans in 2009 to 4 percent in 2019. An additional 5 percent now call themselves agnostics, compared with 3 percent a decade earlier."