Since 2020, experts and journalists have been predicting or declaring a baby boom. It never happened. Now that we have numbers from 2023, it’s clear that despite some ups and downs during COVID-19, America is simply continuing on a downward slope — an ever-worsening baby bust.

When the world locked down in the spring of 2020, plenty of folks predicted a lockdown baby boom — after all, what else were couples going to do while cooped up in the house all day?

Of course, the opposite happened. In 2020, we had the lowest number of births in many decades. The 4% drop in births was massive. This is because families require community support — neighbors, extended family, friends, schools, and so on.

Yet, in 2021, experts predicted a huge reversal in 2022.

“Experts were certain we’d see a baby boom during the COVID-19 pandemic, but birth rates were actually down in 2020,” one news report read. “Now, there are some early signs that the baby boom we were expecting could actually happen next year.

“Are we ready for a baby boom in 2022? All signs point to yes.”

Sure enough, 2021 did see more births than 2020, but still fewer than 2019. Surely, though 2022 — when folks were fully out from lockdowns — would show a real rebound in births?

Nope. 2022 showed births flat, and still lower than in 2019.

And even as late as 2023, some folks massaged the numbers to say, hey there actually was a pandemic baby boom in 2020 and 2021.

It was a plausible argument: American women increased their babymaking, it’s just that we didn’t get immigrant women.

These numbers come in very delayed for many reasons. First of all, there’s the nine-month gap between when a baby is created and when it is born. The record-keeping is done by individual hospitals, and then individual counties, and then 50 states plus the District of Columbia. And for modeled numbers such as the Total Fertility Rate, there is also math to do.

So now, four years after the lockdowns began, we finally have numbers through the end of 2023. And they tell us that there never was a pandemic or post-pandemic baby boom.

In 2023, we had fewer babies than even in the lowest year of COVID-19, and we just posted the lowest birthrate in history.

So here’s what happened: America has a low and steadily falling birthrate. The bumps in the last three years didn’t show any real change — it’s just that 2020’s birthrate was extra low, and in 2021 and 2022, we returned to our old downward trajectory. There was a partial makeup in late 2021 and in 2022 for babies not born during lockdown, but only partial.

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From 2008 through 2019, births were falling by about 1.17% a year. Had that continued in 2020 through 2023, rather than the down-and-up we had, we would have actually had almost 20,000 more births in those four years. That is — we never made up for the babies we never made in 2020.

This is a full-fledged baby bust. It’s time the “experts” stop pretending anything else.