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