Free Republic

Are childrens’ car seats driving down the fertility rate in America?Jonathan V. Last sees car seats as part of a “huge constellation of factors in modern life” that “nudge” people toward having fewer children, he said during an interview about his book, What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster.Last said car seats effectively create a small “tax on people who want to have more than two kids” by making it harder to fit three kids into a normal sedan, which encourages parents to buy a larger car. This penalty may not dissuade people who already want...

•EU watchdog reveals approval for GM foods fails to identify poisonous gene •54 of the 86 GM plants approved contain the dangerous gene •Gene found in food for farm animals producing meat, milk and eggs •Biotech supporters argue there is no evidence that GM foods are harmful A virus gene that could be poisonous to humans has been missed when GM food crops have been assessed for safety. GM crops such as corn and soya, which are being grown around the world for both human and farm animal consumption, include the gene. A new study by the EU’s official food...

After almost 40 years of legalized abortions throughout the United States — and longer in states that okayed abortions pre-Roe — the U.S. population has been decimated to the point that the nation is seeing the lowest population growth since the 1930s.Abortion has destroyed not only one generation of Americans but a second as well — people who should be boosting the fertility rate in their childbearing years now who were victims of abortions in the 1970s and 1980s. In total, more than 55 million Americans are been victimized by abortions and millions more were never born because their parents...

Abortions in the United States Total number of abortions in the U.S. 1973-2011: 54.5 million+ 234 abortions per 1,000 live births (according to the Centers for Disease Control) Abortions per year: 1.2 million Abortions per day: 3,288 Abortions per hour: 137 9 abortions every 4 minutes 1 abortion every 26 seconds These statistics include only surgical and medical abortions. Because many contraceptive measures are abortifacients (drugs that induce or cause abortions), it is important not to overlook the number of children killed by chemical abortions. Since 1965, an average of 11 million women have used abortifacient methods of birth control...

Dr. Ernest Zeringue Davis, CA, November 21, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A doctor in Davis, California is promising a successful IVF pregnancy for just $9,800, with an unheard-of money-back guarantee.  The catch?  Patients will be implanted with someone else’s baby. In-vitro fertilization (IVF) is notoriously expensive.  A single round of IVF averages $12,400, with no guarantee of a pregnancy.  Women wishing to become pregnant using the method must often undergo the procedure repeatedly until they end up with a baby or run out of money, since insurance typically limits how much can be spent on the procedure. Dr. Ernest Zeringue cuts...

Value depends on scarcity. In the world of human reproduction, the most valuable entity is the fertile female—specifically, her eggs and womb. The fierce politics surrounding female fecundity and women’s reproductive rights rests not only on a woman’s ability to create new life, but also on the incredible amount of commitment and risk involved when her eggs and womb are accessed for procreation. Since women are fertile for a shorter period than men, since gestation takes 40 long weeks, and since labor and delivery pose life-threatening risks, young women will always face disproportionately high demands for access to their bodies....

Technically, it is Jeanette Fardelin’s children who are the bona fide modern-day miracles. Conceived on the same day but born six years apart — thanks to the wonders of IVF and the deep freeze — the five Fardelin siblings are ‘quintuplets’ for our age. But any working mum spending an afternoon with Jeanette and her brood would leave their neat Liverpool home concluding that she is the extraordinary one. How does she do it? (And by ‘it’, I don’t mean pop out five matching babies in six years. That one can be scientifically explained). The result? Five little miracles born...

To those who've declared European civilization dead due to demographics, I've often replied that in Europe, there are ents. In J.R.R. Tolkein's "The Lord of the Rings" series, ents were extremely long-lived tree-like creatures who thought in terms of centuries, not years. They were painfully slow to act, but amazingly forceful when they do. What we're witnessing in Europe is a rebound of birth rates that is slow and incomplete, yet highly significant and growing. These rebounding birth rates are not due to Islamic and African immigrants. In many nations, the number of Islamic immigrants is much lower than perceived...

Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad presents The Polar Express in Durango, Colorado.The Polar Express

A speech by Don Feder at Ave Maria University, September 20, 2011 Hollywood has a penchant for blowing things up – especially the world. Since the 1950s, apocalyptic movies (which come with a variety of special effects) have been all the rage. We’ve met our doom through nuclear war (“On The Beach,” “The Day After”), a worldwide super-plague (“Twelve Monkeys” “The Stand”), global warming (“The Day After Tomorrow,” “Waterworld,”), the earth’s core over-heating (“2012,” “The Core”), overpopulation (“Soylent Green”), a comet striking the earth (“Deep Impact,” “Armageddon”), sentient machines taking over (the “Terminator” and “Matrix” series), rampaging simians (the “Planet...

Canadian doctors are considering a policy that would bar obese women from trying to have babies through fertility treatments – provoking debate over whether the fat have the same reproductive rights as the thin. Some studies find obese women face higher risks of medical complications while trying to become pregnant through in-vitro fertilization (IVF). The science is not certain and some believe a ban would be tantamount to discrimination, yet a growing number of fertility doctors worldwide already bar treatment based on a woman’s Body Mass Index. “We’ve had many angry patients say to us, ‘This is discriminatory’ and I...

As if the new York Times couldn’t sink any further down the hole of warped and twisted pro-abortion activism, the Gray Lady is out with yet another “news” piece that moves the newspaper further beyond the pale.Ruth Pawder is out today with a new story titled “The Two-Minus-One Pregnancy,” that focuses on “selective reduction” – the euphemistic phrase given to name the destruction of one or more unborn children in a multiple pregnancy situation where a mother has more than one baby resulting from an IVF pregnancy involving the implantation of multiple human embryos.The Times never makes it past the...

(Translation from Swedish into English:) Stockholm: More and more Swedish families have a third child. "Trebarnstrenden," - The "three children trend" which has become increasingly manifest since the 1990s, was unexpected by demographers at Statistics Sweden (SCB), which lies behind the study. - We had expected a reduction of third child births given that women become older when they have their first child, about 29 years, and therefore would have a hard time getting a third child, says Lotta Persson, demographer at Statistics Sweden who carried out the study. Even in the early 1990s there were many who got a...

Moms give birth to sons or daughters - pretty straightforward stuff. But when one English toddler grows up and starts a family, her child will be her own half-sibling. At least that's the plan. The toddler, two-year-old Mackenzie Stephens, was born without ovaries, so her 25-year-old mother, Penny Jarvis, intends to freeze her own eggs so that Mackenzie can use them someday to start her own family, the Daily Mail reported. Jarvis, of Sheffield, England, told the paper she was devastated when she learned that Mackenzie would be infertile - the result of Turner Syndrome, a female-only genetic disorder that...

We can thank Providence that the earthquake was not 150 miles closer to Tokyo, else Japan's dead might number in the millions. Prime Minister Naoto Kan calls it the worst crisis since World War II. Yet, horrendous as it is, it does not, thus far, compare with that. For the earthquake dead are not 1 percent of those who perished in World War II. Between 1942 and 1945, Japan was stripped naked of an empire that embraced Formosa, Korea, Manchuria, the entire China coast, all of French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia), Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia),...

Writing on a popular online blog, the anonymous whistelblower, said that colleagues in his force had been ordered not to use the expression on “diversity” grounds. The blogger, who writes under the pseudonym Inspector Gadget, after the cartoon character, is understood to be a serving inspector in a county force in southern England, which he refers to only as “Ruralshire” – “a county in England, not too far from Metrocity”. [snip] In his latest posting, he dismissed the alleged ban on the phrase as “another nonsensical, empire-building, silly, frothy, pathetic and downright insulting example of political correctness gone mad”. "We...

December 12, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The socially liberal Economist magazine is admitting that the Japanese economy is in deep trouble due to low fertility rates and an aging population, which threaten to bankrupt the social security system and lead to perpetual economic stagnation. In a special section devoted to Japan appearing in the November 20-27 edition, the Economist laments that “Japan is heading into a demographic vortex. It is the fastest-aging society on Earth and the first big country in history to have started shrinking rapidly from natural causes.” However, the causes that the Economist calls “natural” include artificial birth...

Overpopulation panic is back. Concerns about a world too full of “filthy human children” motivated eco-terrorist James Lee when he held employees of the Discovery Channel hostage at gunpoint in September. But the deranged Lee is far from alone when it comes to worrying about overpopulation. The May-June cover of the progressive magazine Mother Jones asked, “Who’s to Blame for the Population Crisis?” British journalist Matthew Parris wrote an op-ed in September in the London Times asserting, “If you want to save the planet, stop breeding.” Parris further coyly suggested that we study “China’s example, for lessons good and bad.”...

In 2010, a surge in the Israeli Jewish fertility rate is a long-term, unique, global phenomenon, while fertility rates decline sharply in the Third World in general and in Muslim countries in particular. In 2010, there is a 66% Jewish majority in 98.5% of the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean (without Gaza) – and a 58% Jewish majority with Gaza. That Jewish majority benefits from a demographic tailwind and from a high potential of aliyah (Jewish immigration) and of returning Israeli expatriates.

Taipei, May 14 (CNA) Taiwan's birth rate has been dwindling over the last few decades and had dropped to an average of 1.03 births per woman last year from 3.09 recorded in 1976, according to data released Friday by the Ministry of the Interior (MOI). The number of births in 2009 fell to 191,310 from 425,125 recorded in 1976, while the crude birth rate -- the annual number of births per 1,000 of the total population -- was only 8.29 last year, a big drop from 25.92 in 1976. Both figures are new record lows, the MOI statistics show. The...