“We were isolating,” she said, “so we didn’t have any support at all. We furloughed our nanny, so it was my husband and I doing all the care for an active 18-month-old. Putting our daughter to bed one night, I said, ‘I don’t think we can have another right now. … I don’t think I can do it when I’m so uncertain of what our future’s going to look like.’ ”

She was not the only one. A recent Brookings Institution study shows 60,000 fewer births than expected between October 2020 and February 2021 in the United States, corresponding with fewer conceptions earlier in 2020. The largest number of missing births were in January 2021, which roughly corresponds to conceptions in April 2020, when many Americans began to process the magnitude of the pandemic.

“Uncertainty is not good for fertility,” said Phillip Levine, a professor of economics at Wellesley College and co-author of the report. “You want to know that when you’re bringing a child into the world, you’re going to be bringing the child into an environment that’s safe and secure, and if you can’t forecast that, that’s when things will be, ‘Maybe now is not the right time.’ ”