Free Republic

President Xi Jinping recently vowed to launch comprehensive initiatives to address China’s rapidly declining birth rate.Behind the bombastic rhetoric, however, there lies a truly sobering fact: new policies probably won’t be enough to arrest China’s demographic decline. Here’s why.In China, a hyper-traditional society, having a child out of wedlock is still frowned upon. Childbearing and childrearing are synonymous with marriage. Last year, the communist nation saw marriage rates hit a 35-year low. The sharp drop in marital vows comes at the same time China faces an impending demographic crisis. 2021 saw 7.6 million marriage registrations, the fewest since 1986. With...

Research offers possibility that declining birth rate contributes to liberalization. PAY WALL

The mysterious thing is not that people are having fewer kids. It’s that they’re still having as many as they are. Numbers first. In late January the Office for National Statistics noted, in an “ooh that’s interesting” kind of a way, that in 2020, for the first time, half of women in England and Wales remained childless by their 30th birthday. In economy in which wages barely rise, a huge pile of debt if they’re a graduate and a housing market in which the only way to attain secure housing is to buy but the only way of buying is...

‘We strongly believe in families, so we have done everything in the last decade to help families have children … and improve their standards of living.’(LifeSiteNews) — Hungary has logged its highest birth rate in 27 years at the end 2021, owing to the country’s commitment to family values. According to the Hungarian Central Statistical Office (KSH), Hungary had a birth rate of 1.59 children per woman between January to November last year, which represents a 78% increase since 2010, when the birth rate was at 1.25. It is also the country’s highest birth rate since the year 1995, which...

In a recent interview, billionaire Elon Musk stated that the most serious problem we face as a society is that not enough children are being born.I can't emphasize this enough. There are not enough people. And I think one of the biggest risks to civilization is the low birthrate and the rapidly declining birthrate. He's right. The statistics are grim: in 2020, the Centers for Disease Control reported that the U.S. birth rate is plummeting and is the lowest it has been since 1909. The 2020 Census data show that population growth is the slowest since 1930.Part of the population...

While speaking at the fourth annual Demographic Summit in the Hungarian capital last week, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš spoke out against liberal policies which promote mass migration as a way to solve Europe’s aging population problem, saying that the only way to prevent the extinction of European peoples is for governments to adopt policies which encourage young people to have more children. “Mass and uncontrolled migration to Europe has nothing to do with the sustainability of our European society — quite the contrary. The only truly sustainable solution against the extinction of Europe is to increase the birth rate...

Dyanna Volek was never someone who dreamed of becoming a mother. From an early age, she knew deep down that she didn't want children. Maybe it stemmed from seeing her mother sacrifice her dream of becoming a flight attendant and work three jobs to raise two kids alone. Or maybe it was that other endeavors interested her more. "I'm always looking forward to the next thing," said Volek, who works in local government in San Francisco. "Being a parent was never one of them." Still, the idea of not having children seemed taboo, so she didn't dwell on it much....

As concerns about China's demographic deterioration intensifies (stoked by news that the country's birthrate fell to its lowest level in 2020 since CCP record-keeping began in 1949), one city in Southwest China's Sichuan Province is offering couples subsidies per month to make babies. China is battling not one but three demons: insurmountable debts, deflation, and demographics threaten to derail the economy. To fix this, and what may be a pilot test for a much wider rollout, Panzhihua city in Southwest China's Sichuan Province, with about 1.23 million population is handing out 500 yuan ($76.87) per baby every month for families...

As California’s population drops due to a mass exodus of residents escaping high taxes, exorbitant housing costs, and increasing homelessness, there’s another factor that’s been quietly contributing to the downturn: the declining birth rate.Data shows that while the Golden State’s population continues to grow old, young adults are having fewer kids.John Moorlach, a former state senator and Orange County supervisor, told The Epoch Times that the long-term impact of the state’s dropping birth rate is “hard to predict,” because the current administration’s border policy has made immigration numbers unclear.But if immigration is minimized and there is zero growth, Moorlach said...

On May 15, 2020, my husband and I walked into a Maryland hospital delivery ward, our faces fully masked but hiding big smiles. I was scheduled to deliver my second baby boy. He was one of the 3.6 million babies born last year into a world of uncertainty brought on by the coronavirus. A potential silver lining to the very dark coronavirus cloud was that our nation might experience a baby boom. Unfortunately, a bump in births did not materialize; births fell yet again in 2020 to a low not seen since 1979. New life is a mark of a...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that births in the USA reached another historic low in 2020. For the sixth consecutive year, the birth rate dropped -- this time by 4%. The average annual drop in the five previous years was 2%. The rate at which American women are having babies is way below the rate necessary to keep the population steady-state -- that is, for the population not to shrink. A steady-state population requires a total fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman. In 2020, it was 1.64. Needless to say, for politicians, there is no problem...

When the COVID-19 pandemic started and lockdowns became part of our daily lives, some romantic souls were predicting that this would produce a baby boom. Now, as the data shows up, we see exactly the opposite. CBS obtained data from health departments in over two dozen states that shows "a 7% drop in births in December -- nine months after the first lockdowns began." Research from the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., predicts that births may well be down 300,000 to 500,000 in 2021. The prediction is based on a negative correlation between birth rates and the unemployment rate. Higher...

New data is confirming a baby boom that some doctors expected was actually a "baby bust." Health departments in more than two dozen states provided records to CBS News, showing a 7% drop in births in December — nine months after the first lockdowns began.Researchers say it continues a much bigger plunge in fertility in recent decades.The number of babies the average woman in the U.S. is expected to deliver has dropped from nearly four in the 1950s to less than two today...While the global population is still growing, a major study published in The Lancet in 2020 predicted it...

On Thursday, the National Health Commission issued a statement saying it will conduct research to “further stimulate birth potential.” It said the initiative will focus first on northeastern China, the country’s former industrial heartland that has seen a major population decline as young people and families depart for better opportunities elsewhere. The region comprising the three provinces of Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang saw its total population decline for the seventh straight year by 427,300 in 2019 over 2018. Authorities said last week that registered new births fell 15.3% last year to just 10 million.

New data released by a number of states across the country show significant drops in birth rates, pointing to signs of what could be a broader baby bust amid the pandemic. Last month, a Brookings Institution report reiterated an initial projection that the coronavirus pandemic would result in at least 300,000 fewer births in 2021. Data recently gathered by NBCLX from December 2020, when the first babies conceived during the pandemic would be born, are already showing signs of significant decline. Compared to the same period a year earlier, a number of states that keep track of their births in...

People To Have More Babies Republicans must become not just the party of workers but also the party of families. They should do it by upping Joe Biden’s proposed child tax credit into something bigger.As the Republican Party charts its path during a Joe Biden presidency, there will undoubtedly be calls from the corporate wing to return to the neoliberal orthodoxy that defined it under the Bushes, Mitt Romney, and Paul Ryan. This would be a profound mistake.President Donald Trump has repositioned Republicans as the party of workers with his focus on trade, industrial, and immigration issues. By crafting an...

Some experts argue that the success of China and its neighbors in slowing the spread of the virus without resorting to costly shutdowns gives these countries a leg up in getting their economies back on track once the crisis subsides. Some even go as far as to predict that this will propel East Asia to dominate the post-COVID economy. However, such rosy predictions of a dawning of a new “East Asian era” may be premature in light of the ticking demographic timebomb that looms over the region.

The shrinking population affects the 'very existence of our country,' President Sergio Mattarella warns.ROME, Italy, February 20, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) ― Italy welcomed its smallest number of newborns in 2019, leading its president to foretell the country’s doom. “This is a problem that concerns the very existence of our country,” said Sergio Mattarella, 78. “The fabric of our country is weakening, and everything must be done to counter this phenomenon.” According to Italy’s national statistics agency, ISTAT, there were only 435,000 births in Italy last year, the lowest number ever recorded in the country, compared with 647,000 deaths. The number of...

China’s official demographic data in 2019 has seriously overestimated the country’s actual birth rate and population size, a grave mistake that will lead to disastrous policymaking if leaders blindly take these numbers as fact． My estimates show that China’s actual population size should be 1.279 billion at the end of 2019, or 121 million fewer than the officially stated 1.4 billion. The actual number of births in China last year should be about 10 million instead of 14.65 million, as reported by the National Bureau of Statistics. It doesn’t require rocket science to see the absurdity of China’s official demographic...

Empty Egg Carton: Why have western women stopped having babies? 22 min. video: Empty Egg Carton: Why have western women stopped having babies?