Childbearing attitudes amid successive novel infectious disease epidemics: a mixed-method experimental approach

Abstract Amid novel infectious disease epidemics, societal norms regarding when or whether women should or should not have children are highly prone to change as social life is severely disrupted. We argue that, in periods of exacerbated uncertainty such as during the emerging months of a novel infectious disease pandemic, women use memory of another recent epidemic as an anchor to define how to go about their lives. We combine unique experimental data from a population-representative sample of 3,860 women with qualitative data from fifty-six semi-structured interviews in Pernambuco, Brazil to examine childbearing attitudes during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic among women of reproductive age, who less than three years before the start of the pandemic faced another novel infectious disease outbreak, the Zika epidemic. This mixed-method study underscores how epidemics can leave lasting imprints, which emerge as a frame of reference for navigating future epidemics, even in a different disease context. These scarring effects get activated and re-activated to shape attitudes during the emergence of a subsequent equally uncertain public health crisis, and fade as the current epidemic unfolds. Combined, this mixed-method experimental study contributes to the understanding and empirical works of the sociology of epidemics by problematizing the scarring effects of successive novel infectious disease crises.