Objectives:

This paper aimed to monitor the effects of the COVID-19 crisis on the number of births in Jordan

Abstract:

This paper aimed to monitor the effects of the COVID-19 crisis on the number of births in Jordan, The paper showed that, according to the data of the Civil Status and Passports Department for the number of births by months for the year 2020 and updated until February, 2021 and comparing it with the corresponding number of births by months for 2019, the number of Jordanian births tended to decrease over a period of 12 months for the year 2020 compared to 2019. However, the sharp drop in the number of births in December, which records the births of pregnancies in the month of March 2020 (the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown in Jordan) was higher than the rest of the months, as it fell from 14,506 births in December 2019 to 12,946 births in December 2020, a decrease of 10.8%. This came contrary to expectations as it was expected that the number of births would increase during this month due to the lockdown that began on March 21st, 2020.

Likewise, the trend of the number of foreign births in 2020 by months compared to the number of births/ by months of 2019 did not contradict the trend of the number of Jordanian births/ by months in 2019 and 2020. The number of foreign births in 2020 recorded a decrease over a period of 12 months, and a decrease in the number of births in December 2020 compared to the number of births for the same month in 2019. The number of foreign births in December 2019 reached (2371), while the number of births for the same month in 2020 reached (2131), recording a decrease of 10.1%, and that too was contrary to expectations.

It was expected that the number of births would increase during the period of quarantine and economic closure resulting from the outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic in Jordan, due to poor access to reproductive health services, especially family planning services during the complete lockdown, but what happened was the opposite: continued trend in the decline of the number of births. It can be said that the COVID-19 was not a reason for the increase in the number of births in Jordan, nor was it the only reason for the decrease in the number of births in December 2020, and perhaps the COVID-19 crisis was an additional reason for the decrease in the number of births in December 2020, inferred from this with the indicators that showed a noticeable decline in the number of births over the past years, even before the spread of Corona pandemic, the repercussions of the crisis and the resulting poor economic conditions and high unemployment rates could have led the family to seriously reconsider the consequences of the birth of a new child in light of the crisis conditions and its repercussions.