Free Republic

I’m a big fan of Alex Berenson’s work vis-à-vis Covid, marijuana, and tech-government suppression of free speech (see Berenson v. Biden), but when it comes to his search for answers to America’s “baby bust,” he, like many others, fails to focus on the problem’s root cause. It’s as if he were dealing with vaccines for the Wuhan virus without considering its gain-of-function lab origin. One fact that Berenson overlooks is that U.S. birth rates are following the same negative trend that’s been apparent for decades in Europe. When Mark Steyn wrote America Alone in 2006, the birth rate among Western...

At the start of the pandemic, many expected the lockdowns and quarantines to lead to a “baby boom.” Well, the data is in. Instead of a “boom” it’s been a “bust.” As CBS recently reported, records from more than two dozen states show a “7% drop in births in December — nine months after the first lockdowns began.” While 7% might sound like a small dip, it’s not. As The New York Times puts it: “The pandemic’s serious disruption of people’s lives is likely to cause ‘missing births’ — potentially a lot of them. Add these missing births to the...

The nation's fertility rate stabilized last year for the first time in five years, according to early data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That follows four years of big declines during the economic downturn that pushed the rate—the number of births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44—to the lowest levels on record.

The recession has been over for four years, but the birth rate in the U.S. continues to fall as many people struggle with a sluggish economy and financial uncertainty. According to a recent analysis by the Pew Institute, since 2007 when there were a record 4,316,233 births, the number of births has been steadily declining, with 4,007,000 births in 2012 - the lowest number since 1998. Analysts say that the birthrate is dictated by the economy.

Born in 1970, Republican Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan is the first generation X’er to be on a national ticket. Since the 1990’s my fellow generation Xer’s have been an often overlooked group of individuals compared to the older and much larger generation of baby boomers and the World War II generation. We’ve been called slackers, baby busters, cynical, skeptical, angry and indifferent among other descriptions. However, is this really the case now? Forty percent of generation X’ers are from families whose parents divorced. Many became known as “latch key children.” The Bergen County Record reported in 1995: More than...

Boomer demographics and postponement of marriage on account of student debt and poor finances are two of the key reasons that I long-ago stated the housing recovery would be slow for a decade. Declining birthrates now show that is indeed what is happening. First, please consider a short snip from my July 25 post "Actual" New Home Sales First 6 Months of 2012 vs. Prior Years; Reflections on the Housing Recovery Reflections on the Housing Recovery Even with today's reported decline, new home sales have likely bottomed on an annual, cumulative-total basis. However, don't expect much in terms of recovery.Debt...

Conservative Baby Boom, Liberal Baby Bust In a trend that’s found worldwide as well as in the U.S., liberals are much less likely to have children than conservatives. That trend "augers a far more conservative future — one in which patriarchy and other traditional values make a comeback, if only by default,” Phillip Longman, a fellow at the New America Foundation, writes in an essay in USA Today. "Childlessness and small families are increasingly the norm today among progressive secularists. As a consequence, an increasing share of all children born into the world are descended from a share of the...

An editorial in the Washington Post called "The Baby Bust" got me to thinking about the late 1960s through the 1970s when there was hysteria in this country concerning population control. Then-Senator Bob Packwood, Republican of Oregon, spoke about the "population problem" whenever he had the opportunity. To hear him tell it, the United States was just going to run out of space. Moreover there might not be appropriate resources for those who were born. The late Senator Jacob Javits, Republican of New York, suggested that the situation was so bad perhaps the government should consider licensing parents, giving them...