Empirical research shows that birth rates decline during economic downturns and upsurge during growth periods, however, many studies also shows that the fertility response varies significantly across recession episodes, countries, parities, age and social groups. This study contributes to the literature on the cyclicality of fertility by investigating childbearing risk in a comparative analysis of the five Nordic countries. Within this context, we harmonize high-quality register data from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden with the objective of comparing the impact on birth risk of the two most recent recessions that hit those economies: the 1990s and 2010s crises. We thus investigate 5x2 country-period cases of childbearing dynamics following the recession episodes. We use the harmonized longitudinal data to analyze the fertility history of women and examine the effect of economic downturns by age, cohort, and parity. For the analyses, we follow a previously tested method using event-history techniques to present parity-specific indices of childbearing risks during a given calendar year relative to a baseline year. To our knowledge, this is the first study to do this in a comparative framework.