Project description
Exploring the pandemic’s surprising impact on birth outcomes
Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, a surprising trend emerged regarding babies conceived during lockdowns. They may represent the most socially advantaged and thus healthiest cohort in recent history. Termed the Lockdown Cohort (LoCo)-Effect, this phenomenon raises questions about the pandemic's long-term impacts. With the support of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) programme, the LoCo-Effect project will analyse individual-level register data from multiple European and Latin American countries and the US. Using natural experimental methods, the project aims to understand how pandemic-induced changes in parental demographics affect birth outcomes. This interdisciplinary effort promises insights into the pandemic's unexpected effects on pregnancy and birth, with far-reaching implications for public health and social policy.
Objective
The COVID-19 pandemic placed a heavy social and health burden on populations. Yet, because of social inequalities in the pandemic’s impact on fertility behaviour, babies conceived during the pandemic may be the most socially advantaged and healthiest birth cohort of the last decades. Research on this counterintuitive but realistic consequence of the pandemic – the Lockdown Cohort (LoCo)-Effect – is critical for public policy and the understanding of pandemic consequences.
As individual-level register data for babies conceived and born in 2021 and later is only just becoming available, we still know little about how the pandemic changed the composition of parents and to what extent this explains changes in birth outcomes for those born during the pandemic. To address this knowledge gap, I will use individual-level register data (2010-2022) from Finland, Scotland, Austria, Spain, the United States, and Brazil and natural experimental methods to study the LoCo-effect comparatively. This strengthens the generalisability of results across different welfare regimes and pandemic experiences. First, I will study the magnitude of compositional changes in parental characteristics due to the unequal impact of the pandemic on fertility. Second, I will analyse the extent to which differences in prematurity and birth weight between the LoCo and earlier cohorts are caused by this change in parental characteristics. Third, I will estimate how the pandemic has affected intersectional social inequalities in birthweight and preterm birth.
This project is innovative because it bridges disconnected debates in demography, epidemiology, and sociology to explain why, against expectations, pregnancy and birth outcomes have improved during the pandemic. As parental characteristics and birth outcomes shape health, developmental, and socioeconomic outcomes throughout life, the results of this project will influence social and public health research and policy for decades to come.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- medical and health sciences health sciences public health epidemiology pandemics
- social sciences sociology demography fertility
- medical and health sciences clinical medicine obstetrics
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2023-PF-01
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00014 Helsinki
Finland
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