Posted on 06/08/2008 4:01:23 PM PDT by MinorityRepublican
Smart journalists should never mistake a single data point for a meaningful development. Data isn't the plural of anecdote, as the saying goes. But every so often you have to go with your gut. And so I'm suggesting—not declaring—that the recent results from Pediatrix Medical Group may indicate that the slower economy is causing a decline in births.
Pediatrix owns group practices of neonatal specialists and employs 1,070 physicians and 400 nurse practitioners in 32 states and Puerto Rico. Its teams staff some 257 neonatal intensive care units, about one-sixth of the nation's total. Pediatrix has a market capitalization of $2.5 billion. (Here's the company's history and its 2007 annual report.) The company says that about 12 percent of births require NICU admissions. By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, Pediatrix winds up caring for about 2 percent of the babies born in the United States each year.
In recent years, the birthing industry and Pediatrix have been on a roll. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, births rose 1 percent in 2005 and another 3 percent in 2006 to 4.265 million, the highest number of births since at least 1960. (Page 3 of this portion of the statistical abstract of the United States has birth data going back to 1960.) As the Washington Postreported, in 2006 the U.S. fertility rate rose to 2.1 babies per woman—a rate "high enough to sustain a stable population"—for the first time since 1971. The rising number of newborns has meant more business for Pediatrix, whose stock has doubled in the last five years. While government data aren't available, it seems that 2007 was another good year for births. The company reported that in the 2007 fourth quarter, same-unit volume at its NICUs rose 4 percent from the 2006 fourth quarter.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsweek.com ...
planned parenthood probably has alread hired consultants to brainstorm about this.
Newsweek? Not exactly a reliable source, especially in an election year.
Of course, a decline in births would have to reflect economic decline 9 months previously, it’s not exactly an immediate result.
Plus, a drop in NICU births isn’t the same as a drop in overall births. Other factors could be contributing to a lower percentage of NICU births such as decline in high risk pregnancies (for example, a drop in drug usage could result in less NICU births).
The way we live and die today, you don't really need any kids.
The State takes care of us in our old age. That itself is quite unfortunate.
I’m very thankful that I have many friends having big families- 6-7-8 kids and more. And they don’t live on farms.
These conservative kids outnumber the liberal kids- so our country will benefit!
“Smart journalists”
Ain’t no such animal. Lost me in two words.
I think you just hit the nail with a sledgehammer.
Kids are now a choice rather then an economical necessity.
The agrarian contract is no longer in force in the developed world.
First world countries are the only ones where the population thinks about the quality of life when having children. The concept of whether you could ‘afford’ to have more children is entirely a first world concept. Nobody in Latin America, Africa or Asia (aside from Japan) would think about this as a factor in reproducing.
A society that is so self-absorbed that it will not reproduce is a society headed for extinction. Societies without children care nothing for the next generation’s future, as long as their own retirements are secure. But they should.
Why must America import tens of millions of Latin American laborers? To do the work that we’ve had too few babies to grow up and do! Since Roe-v-Wade in 1973, we have aborted well over 20 million Americans who would now be between the ages of 19 and 35 — prime working years. You can’t tell me that we “don’t need children” anymore.
Europe’ long-term birth rates are alarmingly low, and its situation is even more bleak. While America imports poor Hispanics from marginally Christian societies, Europe has resorted to mass importation of Muslim workers whose faith is hostile to Western Civilization. As Europeans age and die off without new babies, its native populations will soon begin to shrink rapidly. For example, Spain’s birth rate is so low (1.1 births per woman) that its native population will halve in the next twenty years.
We desperately need more children, not less.
Just in the physical sense, anyone who becomes old, ill, or disabled in any sense "needs" either their own kids, or the social services which depend on everybody else's kids: which is to say, a young, entry-level and mid-level workforce which lifts and carried everybody, which is --- to say the least --- paying more into the system than they're taking out.
To put it in broader, starked terms: "kids" are what "society" is made of. If there are few kids, you have a weak and unsustainable society, even if we're only speaking of its wobbly, inverted-pyramid tax structure, its feeble investment patterns, its lack of risk and verve and innovation and so forth.
In a broader and deeper sense, every parent, every mother and father, can in some sense rescued from the undertow of meaninglessness and futility by the bright promise of their children. We live for the continuity, the conviviality, the satisfaction of seeing a little platoon of fresh youth carrying some portion of "ourselves" into future generations.
The pleasure of nurturing other beings who are like you, and like nobody else in the word, who are kindred spirits and yet stunning originals: is all this foreign to you? Has the personal relationship and richness, the natural affection of families come to an end?
A solo life is a waning and paltry thing if you're not in any way connected with the electric current of the generations.
There are childless people who have rich relationships with young people: some teachers come to mind. Bless them: they are blessed. But without a spiritual relationship with the future, the present runs into nothing but a blank wall.
So it seems to me.
” The concept of whether you could ‘afford’ to have more children is entirely a first world concept.”
Proof is in the pudding: Good old Brainwashing is an educational standard now..
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/
This story doesn’t make sense. The MSM tells us that the poorer you are, the more kids you have because you don’t have access to birth control. Are they now telling us that people can change their behavior and not have as many kids? Inquiring minds want to know...
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