Free Republic

According to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, more than half -- 53 percent -- of Latinas get pregnant by their 20th birthday, nearly twice the national average. "There's a big disconnect between pregnancy rates and what Latina families want and value," said Ruthie Flores, senior manager of the National Campaign's Latino Initiative. Of the 759 Latino teens surveyed, 49 percent said their parents most influenced their decisions about sex, compared with 14 percent who cited friends. Three percent cited religious leaders, 2 percent teachers and 2 percent the media.

TORONTO, April 24, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Plummeting birth rates have resulted in the closure of over 300 schools in Ontario and half of the province's school boards have 90,000 fewer students than they did six years ago. 300 schools are slated to be closed in the province simply because there are not enough children to go into them according to a report by People for Education. "Much of the funding that school boards receive is based on numbers of students," the report said. "As a result, fewer students equals less funding, fewer programs and, in many cases, closing schools." The...

Why are People Having Fewer Kids? Perhaps it's because they don't like them very much. Ronald Bailey | February 26, 2008 The "demographic winter" is coming. So warns a new documentary of the same name. What is the demographic winter? The phrase, according to the film's promotional materials, "denotes the worldwide decline in birthrates, also referred to as the 'birth dearth,' and what that portends." The first half of Demographic Winter was previewed at the conservative Heritage Foundation a couple of weeks ago. According the film, the demographic winter augurs little good, e.g., economic collapse and social deterioration. If current...

According to Kathryn Joyce, sneer-and-smear artist for The Nation, those who are concerned about the worldwide decline in birthrates are -- to put it mildly -- racist, neo-Nazis, who have a hidden agenda and (under the guise of demographic winter) are engaged in our age-old quest to control women's bodies. The Nation is this nation's oldest and largest-circulation leftwing journal (outside of The New York Times, of course). Joyce's screed, "Missing: The 'Right' Babies," will appear in the March 3 print edition, but is currently available online. Joyce believes -- with the faith of one immune to facts and logic...

Steve Mosher is telling me about wolves returning to the streets of European towns. Not as part of some Vermont-model wildlife-recovery scenario but as emblems of a harsh comeuppance mankind is due--they're stalking out of the forests like an ancient judgment, coming to claim mankind's ceded land. We're sitting in a sunny Main Street cafe in Front Royal, Virginia--a beautifying ex-industrial town in the Shenandoah Valley that, as the far edge of DC's suburban sprawl, is lately home to a surprising number of conservative Christian ministries. Mosher, president of the Catholic anticontraception lobbyist group Population Research Institute (PRI), describes his...

Among children in foster care, minorities are in the majority. Disproportionate numbers of black and Hispanic households are referred to foster-care officials, are investigated for abuse and have complaints against them upheld by investigators. Such intuitively obvious facts, gleaned from a recent federal report, are not only news to The Hartford Courant, they're the stuff of banner, front-page headlines. And according to the state Department of Children and its attendant special interests, racism — what else? — is behind these imbalances. To try to reverse them, the DCF spent two years and lots of money developing and implementing a plan...

Population levels across many parts of the developed world are declining, but this is particularly noticeable in former Eastern Bloc states where the number of children being born has plummeted within a generation.

What causes low birth rates? I have debated this issue at some length with blogger Conservative Swede. Among the reasons frequently cited are the welfare state, feminism and secularism. However, if you look closely at the statistics from various countries, the picture gets quite complex, and there doesn’t appear to be an automatic correlation between low birth rates and any one of these factors. The United States has the highest birth rates in the West, but this is largely due to ethnic minorities. If you compare white Americans to white Europeans, the American birth rate is somewhat higher than those...

TOKYO (AFP) - Japan's health minister has come under fire after referring to women as "child-bearing machines" in a speech on the country's declining birth rate. ADVERTISEMENT "The number of women aged between 15 and 50 is fixed," Hakuo Yanagisawa said Saturday at a meeting with local members of the ruling conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in the western city of Matsue, Kyodo News reported. "Because the number of child-bearing machines and devices is fixed, all we can ask is they do their best per capita."Yanagisawa, a 71-year-old former finance ministry bureaucrat, apologised for his remarks during his 30-minute speech,...

In Maclean’s magazine last month, Mark Steyn wrote a plaintive piece about how his new book, America Alone, was unavailable in Canadian bookstores — an apparent victim of a fear of militant Muslim reprisals. The Chapters-Indigo chain subsequently insisted it wasn’t giving Steyn’s book the Mein Kampf treatment (banned from being sold in the chain by the boss, Heather Reisman), but that they hadn’t anticipated the popularity of America Alone (a best-seller) and hadn’t ordered enough copies. Last I heard, the book was in its fourth printing and, happy to say, a phone check with Chapters indicates they’ve now got...

ATLANTA - Out-of-wedlock births in the United States have climbed to an all-time high, accounting for nearly four in 10 babies born last year, government health officials said Tuesday. While out-of-wedlock births have long been associated with teen mothers, the teen birth rate actually dropped last year to the lowest level on record. Instead, births among unwed mothers rose most dramatically among women in their 20s. The overall rise reflects the burgeoning number of people who are putting off marriage or living together without getting married. The increase in births to unwed mothers was seen in all racial groups, but...

"But the data on young Americans tell a different story. Simply put, liberals have a big baby problem: They're not having enough of them, they haven't for a long time, and their pool of potential new voters is suffering as a result. According to the 2004 General Social Survey, if you picked 100 unrelated politically liberal adults at random, you would find that they had, between them, 147 children. If you picked 100 conservatives, you would find 208 kids. That's a "fertility gap" of 41%. Given that about 80% of people with an identifiable party preference grow up to vote...

MOSCOW - Cash for babies is the Kremlin's offer to women in its latest bid to reverse a population decline that threatens to leave large swaths of Russia virtually uninhabited within 50 years. ADVERTISEMENT President Vladimir Putin last week defined the crisis as Russia's most acute problem, and promised to spend some of the country's oil profits on efforts to relieve it. He ordered parliament to more than double monthly child support payments to 1,500 rubles (about $55) and added that women who choose to have a second baby will receive 250,000 rubles ($9,200), a staggering sum in a country...

CONTINENTAL Europe is at a crossroads. No, scratch that. Continental Europe was at a crossroads a few years ago. This week, it appears to have chosen its path. Taken together, the results of Italy's general election (which turfed out an economic reformer in favour of a former EU president) and the French Government's cave-in to rioters protesting against employment law reform suggest that the strongest forces in Europe today are those of appeasement, stasis and socialism. In Italy, voters were faced with a choice between media mogul Silvio Berlusconi, who was swept into office five years ago promising to cure...

"Sharon Dijksma, a leading parliamentarian of the Dutch Labour Party (PvdA) wants to penalise educated stay-at-home women. “A highly-educated woman who chooses to stay at home and not to work – that is destruction of capital,” she said in an interview last week. “If you receive the benefit of an expensive education at society’s expense, you should not be allowed to throw away that knowledge unpunished.”"

You know the old saying about having a hammer and everything looking like nails? I was reading an article in the Journal of Law and Economics about why housing prices in Manhattan are so high, and I thought, "Omigosh! The answer to the demographic implosion." Since my hammer happens to be sex and marriage, even an economics article reminds me of sex. So bear with me. I’ll explain what the article had to say about housing prices. Then I’ll tell you what it has to do with sex...

Political leaders in Germany have vowed to push through new policies to encourage Germans to have more children after alarming new data showed the country is at the bottom of the world's birth rate rankings. Figures issued by the Federal Statistics Office on Friday estimated that the number of children born in Germany in 2005 reflected the lowest birth rates per woman in the European Union and the lowest total since the office began measuring births in 1946. A separate demographic study published last week by the Berlin Institute for Population and Development put Germany last in the global rankings...

One the issues that faces most Western countries is the cost of government-sponsored pensions. For most countries, there is a real concern that the next wave of retirees may drain much from the plans, while the shrinking work force will be forced to pay in much more as a result. In the worst case, there are worries that these plans may become insolvent. But frankly, this cannot come as a surprise. And the reason is simple -- thanks to socialized universal pension plans, children have no value. This might seem a bit of a leap, so let me explain. Children...

ROME - The UK Ambassador to the Vatican got an earful from a Vatican Cardinal at a Rome conference ten days ago for refusing to acknowledge facts about fertility decline and its serious implications. Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, the President of the Pontifical Council on the Family was the keynote speaker at the conference titled "The Family in the New Economy: Reflections on the Margins on Centesimus Annus". The conference, sponsored by the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, was also addressed by Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, a Senior Fellow in Economics at the Institute. Morse presented...

Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the western world will survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most western European countries. There’ll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands— probably—just as in Istanbul there’s still a building called St. Sophia’s Cathedral. But it’s not a cathedral; it’s merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be...

"The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birthrate to sustain it. Post-Christian hyperrationalism is, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than Catholicism or Mormonism. Indeed, in its reliance on immigration to ensure its future, the European Union has adopted a 21st-century variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who were forbidden from reproducing and thus could increase their numbers only by conversion. The problem is that secondary-impulse societies mistake their weaknesses for strengths--or, at any rate, virtues--and that's why they're proving so feeble at dealing with a primal force like Islam....

Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes

Retail sales of baby food in Russia will reach US$371m by the end of 2005, up by 10% in current value terms compared to the previous year. International manufacturers are moving into this lucrative market as demographic changes drive demand. Elena Ruiu, Packaged Food Analyst at Euromonitor International, investigates. The positive performance of baby food sales in Russia is being driven by the improving birth rate, which increased by 16% over the 1999-2004 period, and more importantly by the growing number of children born to women over 30 years of age, living in urban areas.Russian women are focusing on their...

The population is shrinking, but why should I care, says Lionel Shriver. My life is far too interesting to spoil it with children. ___ Meet the Anti-Mom. A story of motherhood gone dreadfully wrong, my seventh novel, We Need To Talk About Kevin, has drawn fire from Catholic websites for being hostile to "family", while grotesque distortions of the book's underlying theme ("It's all right to hate your own child, and if they turn out badly it's not your fault") have spored from article to article like potato blight. Devastated mothers send me confiding letters detailing horror stories of offspring...

"Local authorities, meanwhile, are devising novel ways to increase fertility. In the town of Yamatsuri women will receive 1m yen if they have a third child, and in Ishikawa prefecture families with three children will get discounts at shops and restaurants. The absence of children in so many homes is having an impact. Fun parks are closing and there are signs that the "exam hell" teenagers go through to secure places at top schools and universities is less of an ordeal because the competition is less fierce. The divorce rate has nearly doubled in the past 10 years, with more...

"For Italy is suffering a baby bust; in 2004, its population is starting to decline. Even if Italian men and women start to form more families earlier and have more babies in the immediate future, Italy's population is set to drop from today's 58 million to some 44 million by 2050. If there is no recovery in the birth rate, its population will fall even further."

an. 1, 2005, 9:24PM Italians are prodded to go forth, multiply Falling birthrate heralds economic and cultural crash By CARL HONORÉ Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle Foreign Service Associated Press Pope John Paul II blesses one of 22 newborns at the Vatican's Sistine Chapel in Janurary 2003. As Italy's birthrate falls to one of the lowest in the world, the Roman Catholic Church and the country are urging parents to be reproductive. RESOURCES DECLINING PARENTHOOD In many nations, birthrates have fallen low enough to generate concerns of a demographic collapse. The sharpest declines are in Europe and Asia. A fertility rate...

They keep coming, men and women from rural Mexico, to North County to work in the flower fields of Carlsbad, the nurseries of Rainbow, the avocado groves of Fallbrook and sundry jobs throughout the area. Soon, however, we will see fewer of them coming to work. Wishful thinking? No. The supply of Mexican emigres to the United States will shrink in coming years. Hooray, some say. Others, "Be careful what you wish for; it may come true." In a Wall Street Journal, Joel Millman writes about the plunging Mexican birth rate, a Mexican export industry fueled by the North American...

<p>Poverty and boredom in the Central Valley are pushing teen birthrates far above norms, further testing an economically fragile region.</p> <p>PARLIER, Calif. -- Patty Rodriguez was hardly prepared for the consequences when she began having sex. Her older boyfriend had her convinced that nothing would happen. Besides, many of her Parlier High School girlfriends were sexually active and they hadn't gotten pregnant.</p>

EUROPE’S population will continue to decline for decades even if birthrates improve significantly, researchers have calculated. Trends towards smaller families and later motherhood mean that there are too few women of childbearing age to reverse the decline in the near future, according to an Austrian study. The year 2000 marked a turning point, with the population’s “momentum” becoming negative; there will be fewer parents in the next generation than in this one. At present 1.5 babies are born for every European Union woman, when two births are required for the population “replacement rate” to be maintained. Even if women started...

On a recent night at the Blue Elephant recreation center here, a clutch of parents watched adoringly as dozens of 3- and 4-year-olds sprinted through a colorful playroom, bounced on the cushioned floor or doodled on drawing pads, aglow with creative pride. It was Italy as outsiders still imagine it: child-worshiping and family-loving. But there was something wrong with the picture. Most of the parents were gazing at one, and only one, child. That was true of Gianluca Valenti, who said that giving his son any siblings would be too exhausting and expensive, and of Barbara Lenzi, who said that...