The U.S. birth rate dropped for the sixth consecutive year in 2020, to the lowest point in the last 30 years, according to a report in May from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Experts initially expected to see a rise in the birth rate during the Covid-19 pandemic, because couples would be spending more time at home. The opposite happened, perhaps partially because potential parents feared that the coronavirus could have harmful effects on pregnant women and newborn babies. The drop in births was the most notable in November and December, when babies conceived in the early days of the pandemic would have been born. (Check here to see How Many People Were Born the Year You Were Born.)

Michigan, New York, and Washington, three states hit very hard by the first wave of Covid-19, were the ones with the lowest birth rates in 2020. Utah, Alaska, and Nebraska, which didn’t see the full force of the pandemic until later, had the highest. See how every state’s population has changed since 2010.  

Click here to see the states where people had the most kids in 2020.

To identify the states where the most children were born in 2020, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed provisional data on the total number of births, by state of residence, from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics’ Vital Statistics Rapid Release in May 2021. 

With Covid-19 vaccines being distributed across the country and pandemic death rates dropping, some experts have speculated that the birth rate will rise in 2021, as couples who put off pregnancies now being willing to move forward.