US Birth Decline

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It's interesting because according to Gallup, people still want children. In fact the "ideal family size" is rising in America, going from 2.5 in 2011 to 2.7 in 2018.

This suggests that unlike Europe, we might be able to increase fertility rate if we can improve economic prospects for younger people and if we have a more Natalist culture where people are comfortable having children. Right now the U.S. doesn't even have paid maternity leave, that's a good place to start.

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-SNIP-

I took a closer look at your data and I've found some interesting patterns which provide some rather intriguing pieces of data and also provide evidence to support the theory that Q1 2021 is going to be an outlier in terms of Births/Deaths.

So first up, something that putting this all into quarters leaves out is the month-by-month totals where we can see closer trends. Here is a graph I made showcasing the monthly natural population change for each month from January 2018 - March 2021 (provisional data):

As can plainly be seen, the United States dipped into negative natural population change territory for only four months:

April 2020 (the first surge of COVID deaths, approximately 60K excess deaths in concentrated in the Northeast)

November 2020 (the second surge of COVID deaths, approximately 30K excess deaths)

December 2020 (the second surge of COVID deaths intensifies, approximately 75K excess deaths)

January 2021 (the second surge of COVID deaths peaks, approximately 90K excess deaths, births plummet as the generation conceived in April 2021 is born and turns out to be much smaller than expected)

February 2021 (the second surge of COVID deaths slows down, 75K excess deaths, births rise modestly)

Something that does give a lot of hope though is that by March 2021, births and natural increase had reached the point they were at in March 2020 (which had very few COVID deaths compared to March 2021 and was when babies conceived during June 2019 were being born, and that was a good time economically), and this is already taking into account the 40K excess deaths in March 2021. It remains to be seen, though, whether births continue to rise. I think they will especially because by July 2020 (nine months before April 2021), the economy's recovery had already began and it was a nadir of COVID deaths) and also this fits in with historical trends that births typically rise between March and April.

You can take a better look at observed trends in the chart below:

Something else that also has a good chance of occurring is another birth plummet during July - September 2021, which is nine months after the second COVID surge. This is very possible due to November 2020 - February 2021 not being a very good time economically and even politically. It might not dip the country into negative growth rates because of the usually birth surge occurring that time of year, but it is likely to have an effect. We must be watchful of this.