Government Measures Influence the Timing of Births More than the Total Number

From an excellent, detailed article on recent human fertility, I extract this graph. In 1967 the dictatorship in Romania banned abortion and modern contraception. The result was a birth boom. But the boom was short-livedd and a sharp decline soon followed. Comparison with Bulgaria, another communist government with a similar economy, shows that Romanian policy had little impact on completed cohort fertility (the number of babies women have over the course of their lifetimes). Women who had babies in 1968 just had fewer babies later.

This seems to be happening in Hungary now. The government's birth subsidies did encourage women to have babies, but now fertility is falling again and it seems those were just babies women were planning to have at some point down the road.

Via Marginal Revolution.