Everyone around me is pregnant! My husband and I keep joking that we can’t afford another baby after the beating our stock portfolios have taken in the past year.
To find out who’s the oddball (my pregnant friends or me), I turned to Hitwise. Searches for “pregnancy” are down 37% year over year. Searches that include the word “maternity” are also down and searches for “maternity clothes” are down 74%. The highest volume pregnancy and baby related search term has traditionally been “baby names” and sure enough, searches for “baby names” are down 40%.
I came across a blog by the Population Reference Bureau suggesting that birth rates tend to fall in a down economy. The recession officially started in December 2007 and the author of the blog entry lamented that he won’t know if the pattern continues for some time as data on birth rates during the recession won’t be available for quite awhile.
Okay, again back to Hitwise – can our wonderfully timely data shed any light on this? Searches for “maternity clothes” and “pregnancy” were falling before the recession started. Searches for “baby names” appear to have been increasing slightly until September of 2007, when they too started to fall.

I ran this past a few colleagues to get some input and ideas. James Varughese pointed out that visits to baby related websites are also down. He created a custom category of websites include the word baby in our Lifestyle-Family category ( there were 114 total). He found a 15% drop in market share year on year and a 30% drop from January 2006 to January 2009. Also, historically the highest month over month growth occurred between December and January, but it has decreased significantly between December 2008 and January 2009.
Can the recession really explain away this decline in interest in baby-making when the decline started before the recession started? A few possible explanations (and I welcome input from readers too with other theories/reactions):
- Aging population: Hitwise CMO, Marc Johnson, points out that this could be a macro trend as a result of an aging population in the US.
- Housing prices: It appears that housing prices were already faltering in 2006. Perhaps as Americans grew more concerned about the future price of their homes, they delayed decisions to have children. Looking at Google Trends, news mentions of “housing prices” and “recession” increased significantly in 2008, but had already started to hit the radar as early as 2006.
Perhaps searches for “pregnancy”, “baby names” and “maternity clothes” are more than just indicators of fertility rates. Perhaps they are also indicators of consumer confidence.