Demographers have long observed a pattern that emerges whenever economic crisis strikes: different social strata do not respond in the same way to uncertainty.
Among university-educated women, childbearing is postponed. A career is too valuable to risk when the husband’s job might vanish, and in an age when maintaining a household’s standard of living requires two salaries, holding on to employment is seen as the prudent insurance policy.
At the other end of the spectrum, women with only basic schooling—often from ethnic minorities—tend to react in the opposite way. Their wages are so low that state child allowances can replace their earnings almost entirely. When employment is threatened, the “rational” decision within that milieu is to have a child. In these groups, fertility may actually rise during hard times.
For the Czech Republic, detailed fertility data by educational group are not yet published. But if our pattern mirrors those of other nations, then the decline in precisely those segments where society most needs new life is far more dramatic than we imagine. We will face not only falling birth rates but also a shifting ratio of productive to unproductive members of society.
This, incidentally, may illuminate another puzzle: why vaccinated women in the Czech Republic appear to bear fewer children than the unvaccinated, while in countries spared from deep economic downturns no such relationship is visible. The explanation is not biological but sociological: among university-educated, urban, predominantly white women, vaccination rates are far higher than in other groups. When these women simultaneously delay motherhood, the correlation appears, though the cause lies elsewhere.
What looks like a medical riddle is in fact a symptom of class division. And it reminds us of a sobering truth: the very strata best equipped to carry forward the cultural, moral, and economic capital of the nation are precisely those whose fertility withers under pressure.