By Shari Roan, Los Angeles Times
latimes.com/news/la-heb-us-birth-rate-falls-20110331,0,7651599.story
The maternity business has experienced a recession, too, it appears. Births fell 4% from 2007 to 2009, the biggest drop for any two-year period since the mid-1970s, according to federal government data released Thursday.
The rate, 66.7 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44, isn’t the lowest in recent memory. The 1997 rate was an all-time low of 63.6. But the authors of the report say preliminary data show the birth rate continued falling through the first half of 2010. Read more…
One has to wonder sometimes if Western Civilization is even going to bother showing up for the the future of the world.
Well, not the way things are going in America lately, at least not according to recent government data as reported in the LA Times:
LA Times:
The maternity business has experienced a recession, too, it appears. Births fell 4% from 2007 to 2009, the biggest drop for any two-year period since the mid-1970s, according to federal government data released Thursday.
Meanwhile across the pond, our British cousins are procreating, but not bothering to get married. Consider a few items published recently by their Office for National Statistics: Read more…
File this one under “Duh! Ya’ think?” We exterminate a third of the offspring who would have otherwise been supporting us in our old age, and then we wonder why the Social Security system didn’t work out the way we had planned.
by Steven W. Mosher
As I write, there is a battle royal underway in the Philippine Congress. On the one side are the Planned Parenthood types, backed by well-funded international organizations, who are attempting to ram through legislation that would cripple the Filipino birth rate. On the other side stand those who believe that the most precious resource of the Philippines is its people, and who object to the use of what some call “human pesticides” to control the Filipino population. Read more…
Two articles caught my attention recently. The first was “Japan population shrinks by record in 2010”. The title should be self-explanatory. Already the most aged nation on earth, Japan’s demographic winter in 2010 was the most severe on record.
The result of more and more of their young people “waiting to get married and choosing to have fewer children because of careers and lifestyle issues” is that the proportion of the population over the age of 65 is increasing ever rapidly. (25% now, 40% by 2050) Consider the strain on the economic and social resources of any nation when 4 out of 10 citizens are past retirement age. Read more…
This chart speaks for itself.
One thing that ought to be obvious from looking at this chart is that birthrates are indeed falling all over the world. You must realize that not all of the consequences of this are going to be good.
I find it odd that people dispute the notion that birth rates and other issues relating to population matter a great deal to society and the composition of society. People who comment here attribute my views on this matter to my religious fanaticism or whatever.
I have frequently observed the irony that atheists are often so insistent in their trumpeting of Darwin. Without commenting at all on the merits of Darwin’s ideas, it’s easy to see how secularists of all stripes are Darwin’s biggest losers. They do, after all, have the fewest children. I note with further amusement, that some of our commenters want me to believe that people of my point of view are quickly to die out and disappear from the world. Seeing as how my wife is busily gestating our fourth child, I hardly can see things their way.
But don’t take it from me. Take it from a gay, atheist (I venture to say an “anti-theist”) who recognizes and laments that fact. Witness this article.
What’s that famous quote, by Edna St. Vincent Millay? Oh, yes: “I love humanity but I hate people.” It’s a sentiment that captures my normal misanthropically tinged type of humanitarianism well, but it roars apropos on some particular occasions.
You see, right here in his first paragraph, I already disagree with Bering, the author of this hilarious article. For me, I love human beings, but Read more…
Dr. J has often discussed the essential public purpose of marriage. Many of our commenters have dismissed her account of that purpose because it emphasizes the procreative aspect of marriage as the public purpose. They seem to think that this purpose was made up in order to exclude certain non-favored groups from marriage.
Well, here’s a definition of marriage that has been with us since time immemorial, encoded in the Yoseph Karo’s immortal Shulchan Aruch, the basic code of Jewish Law. It’s the very first paragraph in the very first chapter in the volume containing the laws of marriage (emphasis added. The Rem”a, by the way, is a slightly later gloss added by a different author, Rabbi Moshe Isserles).
1. Every man is obligated to marry a women in order to be fruitful and to multiply and anyone who doesn’t engage in being fruitful and multiplying is as if he spills blood, and lessens the appearance, and causes the divine presence to depart from Israel. Rem”a: He who does not marry is not allowed to make a blessing or to engage in Torah etc. and he is not called a man, and when he marries a woman his sins are cast into doubt, as it is said: “One who has found a wife has found goodness and obtains favor in the eyes of God.” (Prv. 18:22)
While this purpose somewhat differs from Dr. J’s purpose in detail (and somewhat in practice as well), I think the case that marriage is about procreation (and always has been) is well nigh overwhelming.
Lest you think the sentence, “anyone who doesn’t engage in being fruitful and multiplying is as if he spills blood” is wholly without basis, I quote from a recent article about our nation’s second least fruitful city: Seattle. “There’s something missing from many Seattle neighborhoods: the sound of children’s laughter.” The same thing would likely be missing following a general massacre. Surely, Jewish Law does not literally consider a childless person a murderer. Nevertheless, it is essential to note that childlessness and murder share some practical results. (Seattle is the second least fruitful city. Any guesses as to the very least fruitful? No points for correct guesses. That one was just too easy).
December 14th, 2010
Betsy
by Anna Halpine
Who really believes women’s reproductive health is the main concern in House Bill 96?
Last week in Manila, Malcolm Potts, grand-daddy of the international family planning movement, announced that unless the much debated “Reproductive Health” bill is passed in this session of Congress, the Philippines would become the next Somalia. No surprises in that. Within the same week, however, Bill Clinton, also visiting Manila, amazed everyone (including his wife, no doubt) by stating that the growing Philippines population is an asset to the country, and that its babies, expanding the population at a rate of 2.04 per cent a year, are a “massive natural resource”. Read more…
by Carolyn Moynihan
How good are your children at relating to their grandparents? How would they respond if granny developed Alzheimer’s? These questions beg an even bigger one: how will societies with an average of 2 or less children per woman cope with a burgeoning elderly population and a growing worldwide epidemic of dementia? South Korea has come up with answers in a remarkable campaign. Read more…
November 30th, 2010
Betsy
by Brendan O’Neill
Much of the wacky authoritarianism of twentieth-century dystopian literature is now coming to life, from the promotion of homosexuality as a check on population growth to the celebration of childfree women as superior to ‘breeders’.
Reading an op-ed in an American newspaper last month, which argued that gay marriage should be legalised because it will help reduce overpopulation (homosexuals don’t breed, you see), I knew I had heard a similar sentiment somewhere before. Read more…
November 15th, 2010
Betsy
by Mariette Ulrich
“Contraception could be free under health care law”, announced a pre-election Washington Post headline. A “panel of experts” is supposed to be meeting this month “to begin considering what kind of preventive care for women should be covered at no cost to the patient, as required under President Barack Obama’s overhaul.” Up front in the push to make all birth control free is, not surprisingly, Planned Parenthood. Read more…
What China imposed on its population, we’re adopting voluntarily.
Published on The Weekly Standard
For the last several months, Chinese officials have been floating the idea of relaxing the country’s famed “One-Child” policy. One-Child has long been admired in the West by environmentalists, anti-population doomsayers, and some of our sillier professional wise men. In Hot, Flat, and Crowded (2008), for instance, Tom Friedman lauded the policy for saving China from “a population calamity.” What Friedman and others fail to understand is that China is built upon a crumbling demographic base. One-Child may or may not have “saved” China from overpopulation, but it has certainly created a demographic catastrophe. Read more…
From Weekly Standard
What China imposed on its population, we’re adopting voluntarily.
For the last several months, Chinese officials have been floating the idea of relaxing the country’s famed “One-Child” policy. One-Child has long been admired in the West by environmentalists, anti-population doomsayers, and some of our sillier professional wise men. In Hot, Flat, and Crowded (2008), for instance, Tom Friedman lauded the policy for saving China from “a population calamity.” What Friedman and others fail to understand is that China is built upon a crumbling demographic base. One-Child may or may not have “saved” China from overpopulation, but it has certainly created a demographic catastrophe. Read more…
by Carolyn Moynihan
There is an interesting alignment of seemingly quite different stars in China: Christian-inspired abstinence education and official population policy.
America’s Focus on the Family has won the ear of the Yunnan provincial ministry of education and is training teachers to educate Chinese teenagers about abstaining from sex before marriage, reports the Washington Post. The Chinese government wants young people to delay marriage and having a child, but delaying sex is another matter, especially as the country becomes more urbanised and susceptible to global trends. Read more…
I recently reviewed Red Families vs. Blue Families. (I didn’t like it much.) The authors’ constant refrain was “The Blue State Script works. Delay marriage and childbearing until the mid-thirties, with the help of unapologetic use of abortion and contraception. The marriages last longer and are more stable. The kids are better off. Be like us. The Blue State Script works.”
It all depends on what you mean by “works.” Here is an article in The Weekly Standard that shows a bit of Trouble in Paradise. It seems that the Parents in one of the tonier, Bluer regions of the Nation’s Capitol, are inflicting themselves on the Non-Parents, or as they prefer to call themselves, “the Child-Free.” Listen to them complain in these blog entries:
“Keep your nasty little snotty kid away from me, PLEASE!!!! Do not let your stickly offspring rush up to me in Whole Foods and grab my $250 Ralph Lauren silk skirt with its grubby crusty hands.” Read more…
Enviro-whackos invented the “population bomb” to scare people into compliance with their ideas. But night time ghost stories can only scare people for so long. At some point, the facts become so undeniable that even enviro-whackos have to admit they were wrong. (Emphasis added).
A green myth is on the march. It wants to blame the world’s overbreeding poor people for the planet’s peril. It stinks. And on World Population Day, I encourage fellow environmentalists not to be seduced. Read more…
Lefties are fond of condemning the Right for our worries about Demographic Winter.
They’re fond of condemning us, but not so keen about disputing us. That’s because the facts needed to rebut our worries are few and far between.
But there are points to be made in rebuttal. I’ve never seen any such point wielded by a Lefty. So, let me call your attention to one made by an EEEEEEEEVIL Right winger, John Derbyshire. It comes from this week’s broadcast of his gloomy but hilarious podcast “Radio Derb.”
This is a favorite selling point of the immigration boosters. Japan, China, the European countries all have below-replacement birthrates, and so aging populations. Read more…
Childlessness among women aged 40-44 has increased dramatically since even the baby bust years of the 1970s.
(CBS) Nearly 1 in 5 American women beyond childbearing years never gave birth as fewer couples, particularly higher-educated whites, view having children as necessary to a good marriage. Read more…
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