The Italian COVID-19 lockdown, from 11 March to 16 May 2020, led to an economic crisis, social uncertainty and stress. It also limited access to health services, including pregnancy follow-up visits, with a possible rise in poor outcomes for women and newborn infants. However, limited data are available on the number of births and perinatal outcomes of pregnancies that began during the lockdown period.1 We hypothesised that lockdown would have reduced the number of pregnancies.
The first Italian COVID‐19 lockdown reduced births and voluntary terminations by just under a fifth