Free Republic

Russia is going after TV series Game of Thrones, Sex and the City, and the Harry Potter franchise in an effort to purge what it claims is the promotion of "childfree ideology." The development comes months after Russia passed a bill banning what state-run news wires describe as the "public propaganda of the ideas of voluntarily choosing not to have children." It comes as Russia grapples with a dwindling birth rate and as President Vladimir Putin scrambles to encourage women to have children.

After years of ominous headlines about the world's shrinking birth rates, there's a bright spot. The US birth rate increased slightly in 2024, according to preliminary data from the CDC. The 1% rise in births was largely driven by moms in their early 40s, who gave birth to 2% more children in 2024 than in 2023. Moms in their 30s and late 20s also experienced slight increases in births. Brady Hamilton, the lead author of the report, told Business Insider that the stats are a continuation of the trends of the last three decades. Women in their late 20s to...

There has been a downward trend since 1960 in the number of children born in the EU. In 2024, Romania recorded its lowest natality rate in the last 100 years. Romania has registered the lowest natality rate in a century – with figures showing that less than 150,000 babies were born last year. Many Romanian villages are registering an ageing population. In urban areas, many are choosing to put their career first and instead have children at a later age. Some schools and kindergartens have been forced to shut due to the lack of children available to attend courses. This...

Marriages in China plummeted by a fifth last year, the biggest drop on record, despite manifold efforts by authorities to encourage young couples to wed and have children to boost the country's declining population. Declining interest in getting married and starting a family has long been blamed on the high cost of childcare and education in China. On top of that, sputtering economic growth over the past few years has made it difficult for university graduates to find work and those that do have jobs feel insecure about their long-term prospects. More than 6.1 million couples registered for marriage last...

The ineffectiveness of pro-natal programs suggests raising the next generation isn’t a main priority of 21st-century adults.Hungary’s fertility rate dropped to a record low in 2024 despite its best efforts to reverse the birth dearth through economic incentives. Those advocating for similar policies in the United States could learn from Hungary’s unsuccessful pro-natal programs, which have a track record of negligible results everywhere they have been implemented.Nordic countries have the most generous family policies in the world, yet fewer children are born there almost every year. Even in socially conservative Poland, where the “Family 500+” program is widely popular, the...

(CNSNews.com)-- The School Nutrition Association (SNA), which represents 55,000 school nutritionists nationwide, is pointing to data published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to draw awareness to the fact that “after 30 years of steady growth in the National School Lunch Program, student participation is abruptly down in 49 states."The nutritionists attribute the drop to new nutrition standards that were instituted by USDA in 2012.Total national participation in the School Lunch Program peaked in 2010 and 2011 at 31.8 million, according to USDA. In 2012, it was 31.7 million. But in 2013, it dropped by 1 million participants, to 30.7...

exerpt from X Elevating the Status of Motherhood Solves Low Birthrates: The Extraordinary Case of Mongolia For 68 years, Mongolian leaders have given the Order of Maternal Glory to mothers. This raised the status of motherhood and helped forge a remarkably pronatal culture.

Many females are born with all the immature egg follicles they’ll ever have — about 1 to 2 million. Only about 400,000 of those eggs remain at the start of menstruation, which occurs around age 12. With each period, several hundred eggs are lost. Only the healthiest follicles will become mature eggs. The body breaks down and absorbs the rest. Males, on the other hand, continue to create new sperm for most of their adult lives.......... Today, the average age of giving birth for the first time is 26.6 years oldTrusted Source. That age has been steadily increasingTrusted Source in...

As birth rates plunge, many politicians want to pour money into policies that might lead women to have more babies. Donald Trump has vowed to dish out bonuses if he returns to the White House. In France, where the state already spends 3.5-4% of gdp on family policies each year, Emmanuel Macron wants to “demographically rearm” his country. South Korea is contemplating handouts worth a staggering $70,000 for each baby. Yet all these attempts are likely to fail, because they are built on a misapprehension. Governments’ concern is understandable. Fertility rates are falling nearly everywhere and the rich world faces...

South Korea's shrinking pool of conscripts is causing concerns amid the growing threat from North Korea, prompting the military to mull options to effectively maintain combat readiness with limited resources. In South Korea, all able-bodied men must serve mandatory military service for at least 18 months, while women can volunteer for military duty as officers or non-commissioned officers. The number of military personnel has been on a steady decline over the past decades due to the country's persistently low birth rate, falling below 500,000 for the first time last year. South Korea's total fertility rate-- the number of children that...

During the coming decades, it may become increasingly difficult to induce Americans to help defend any of the increasingly numerous countries with birth rates far too low to replace their population, even if a country in question is democratically governed. There is scant evidence that a country’s having a birth rate far lower than is needed to replace itspopulation now diminishes Americans’ willingness to help it defend itself. US Senator JD Vance, speaking on the Senate floor on February 12 to oppose further US military aid to Ukraine, pointed out that “not a single country – not even the US...

Civic duty was put before pride as North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un was caught openly weeping during a plea to “Dear Mothers” over the need to increase birth rates. Despite globalist glee at the prospect of a diminishing world population, alarm bells have been ringing for years about the impact such developments would have on society. Even in the socialist so-called Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the problem was not only apparent, but worth crying over. Speaking Sunday from the capital city Pyongyang, Kim addressed the 5th National Meeting of Mothers, back after an 11-year hiatus, insisting that addressing...

Russian President Vladimir Putin is urging women to have as many as eight children as the number of dead Russian soldiers continues to rise in his war with Ukraine, worsening the country's population crisis. Addressing the World Russian People's Council in Moscow on Tuesday, Putin said the country must return to a time when large families were the norm. "Many of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers had seven, eight, or even more children," Putin said. "Let us preserve and revive these excellent traditions. Large families must become the norm, a way of life for all of Russia's people. The family is...

A staggering 46 percent of Pakistani newborns in the “English” city of Bradford are the direct product of cousin marriages, falling from over 60 percent over the past decade, according to the BBC, which has attempted to contextualize inbreeding amongst minority communities. The BBC drew on a recent study entitled “Born in Bradford,” which recruited 2,317 pregnant women from “inner city wards” without regard for their ethnicity between 2007 and 2010 and then another 2,378 mothers between 2016 and 2019. They found that 62 percent of the Pakistani women involved married either their first or second cousin in the first...

Falling fertility rates in the United States will trigger a "calamitous effect" on the economy if it hasn’t already, experts told Fox News Digital. According to CDC data, between 2007 and 2022, the U.S. birth rate fell by 22%. Not a single state reported an increase in birth rates, although some experienced a slower decline than others.

Humanity has never had it better.Especially the couple of billion lucky folks who live in the United States and Canada, Western Europe, and East Asia (including, now, much of China).The details of the miracle that is modern life are worth repeating, since they are the water we swim in and easy to forget.Deaths in childbirth and childhood are nearly nonexistent. People live longer than ever and can expect to be (physically) healthy into their seventies, not stooped by hard farm, industrial, or household labor. War and conscription have largely ended. In Europe and East Asia, all deaths of violence are...

As we’ve covered many times already, China’s economy is struggling, particularly the construction portion which makes up about a quarter of the country’s GDP. Last week while all of us were distracted by the war in Israel, one of China’s major developers missed loan payments and said it would soon default on its debt.The embattled property developer Country Garden said on Tuesday that it was unable to repay a loan and expected to miss upcoming overseas debt payments as a result of plunging sales from China’s spiraling property crisis.The announcement, made on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, is effectively a...

TOKYO -- Up to 42% of Japanese women born in 2005 could end up not having children in their lifetimes, according to a government estimate, a high percentage that could threaten the future of its social security program. Japan's National Institute of Population and Social Security Research gives this estimate for women born in 2005 under its low-birth scenario. In the medium scenario, 33.4% of this group will go through their childbearing years without having kids. In the most optimistic case, the rate will be 24.6%. The percentage is even higher for men, who are more likely to be unmarried...

Birth rates have fallen since the onset of the war as eight million people, mostly women, have left Ukraine. This has sparked fears that the population could drop to very low levels. The war continues to threaten the very existence of Ukraine - not only via bombing but also through falling birth rates. Ukraine reported that its birth rates have fallen and population growth has stumbled, registering a decline. The fall in population began following the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24 last year. This led to an exodus of Ukrainian women as Ukrainian men were conscripted to fight...