Free Republic

When it comes to the future of work, Japan is caught in a tug-of-war. Tokyo officials are pushing for a four-day workweek, hoping a shorter schedule will ease the nation’s notoriously punishing work culture and curb “karoshi”—which translates to death from overwork. With birthrates falling and burnout rising, many see the shift not as a perk, but a necessity for Japan’s economic survival. But the country’s new prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, is signaling a very different approach. The 64-year-old drew scrutiny this month for summoning staff to a meeting at 3 a.m.—not for a national security crisis, but simply to...

Chances are, you’re already aware that birthrates are falling throughout the developed world, sagging well below the “replacement rate” and sparking worries about the implications of a future dearth of workers and consumers. However, the emphasis on economic implications has allowed a powerful political undercurrent to go almost entirely unnoticed: Birthrates are varying significantly by political orientation, a trend that has the potential to shape electorates and policies for generations to come — to the benefit of conservatives.Replacement birthrates vary over time and place depending on shifts in related variables such as child mortality. In developed countries, sustaining populations without...

If there's any recording worth keeping of Charlie, or sharing with the likes of those who don't know what he stood for, it's this one. It's no accident that God had this speech be one of the final marks he left on earth.

ChatGPT says Black women in the US had a total fertility rate (TFR) of approximately 1.514 births per woman. White women in the U.S. had a total fertility rate (TFR) of approximately 1.52 births per woman in 2024. Asian women had a total fertility rate (TFR) of approximately 1.7 births per woman in 2024 Hispanic women had a total fertility rate (TFR) of approximately 1.92 births per woman in 2024. All well below replacement except..... Immigrant (foreign‑born) women had a TFR of approximately 2.19 children per woman in 2023 – just above the replacement level of 2.1 Immigrant women from...

Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! We’re packing up the hotel room and will return to HQ tomorrow, so Monday’s roundup will be back to normal quality levels. That said, it’s still a terrific roundup for your Weekend Edition: C&C scores predictive win as Deputy Chief of Staff signals consideration of radical immigration policy shift; Trump defies gloomy expert predictions as US-China trade negotiations proceed; Administration scores early victory with preliminary UK trade deal; Trump team telegraphs astonishing, world-shaking tariff policy completely missed by corporate media; another prominent official arrest as New Jersey Mayor feels the J6 pain after making an...

Pronatalists, a controversial fringe group almost exclusively from the political right, claims that some of the most powerful people in the US government are sympathetic to their cause. But how much influence do they really have? Simone Collins is sitting in her 18th century cottage in Pennsylvania, dressed in a black pilgrim pinafore with a wide collar, bouncing one of her four children on her lap. It is 8.30am and she looks a little tired – she runs several businesses, a foundation and is currently pregnant with her fifth child, though she and her husband Malcolm plan to have more....

A tough choice between Muslim Europe and Muslim Russia. Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism. Russia, with a birth rate of 1.5 children per woman, has invaded Ukraine, where the birth rate is 1.2 children per woman, to determine which nation with below replacement birth rates will go extinct the fastest. In the long run the only winners of the war to determine whether Ukraine will belong to the 1.2 or 1.5 people will be the Chechen and other Muslim soldiers doing...

Falling birth rates have put major global economies on the path toward "population collapse," according to a report from McKinsey Global Institute. By 2100, some counties could see their populations tumble 20%-50%.

The United States needs more migrants to replace the children that Americans are not producing, former President Bill Clinton said at a press event on Sunday. “America is not having enough babies to keep our populations up, so we need immigrants that have been vetted to do work,” Clinton said at a fish fry in Fort Valley, Georgia. He repeated the claim at another campaign stop on October 14, saying, “We got the lowest birth rate we’ve had in well over 100 years. We’re not at replacement level, which means we got to have somebody come here if we want...

The collapse in birth rates that began in post-war Europe has, in the decades since, spread to every single corner of the globe. Many nations are already feeling this death spiral, filling more coffins than cradles each year. Just this past year, Japan lost nearly a million people. While Poland lost 130,000. However, the big story comes from China, home to one-sixth of the world’s population. The decades-long devastation wrought by the one-child policy has sent that country, for centuries the pacesetter in population, into absolute decline. China finally admitted that its population was shrinking, but demographers — including myself...

Space X CEO Elon Musk and Argentinian President Javier Milei have met in Texas and spoke about working together to promote free markets and potential lithium projects. President Javier Milei’s chief spokesperson said that during their visit to Tesla’s Austin headquarters, the two talked about a range of issues, including the need to boost declining birth rates globally and the pursuit of technological advancement while upholding “liberty.” Musk has previously expressed his admiration for Milei’s unabashed support of private enterprise as well as his distaste for what he considers to be socialist excesses.

This stands true for basically every industrialized/”liberal” country, and by liberal I mean so-called democracy. That’s because there is no way to incentivize women to have kids. The Guardian: South Korea’s demographic crisis has deepened with the release of data showing its birthrate – already the world’s lowest – fell to a new record low in 2023, despite billions of dollars in government schemes designed to persuade families to have more children. Reports that South Korea’s population had shrunk for the fourth straight year came soon after neighbouring Japan reported a record decline in its population last year, along with...

Since August, there are officially more arriving each month than there arechildren being born to American mothers. And these are just the official encounters -- we don't know how manyavoided detection. https://twitter.com/fentasyl/status/1740779371529740380

Around the world, nations are creating incentives to get citizens to have more children, but their strategies don’t appear to be working. Vox claims, “You can’t even pay people to have more kids.” But are people choosing not to have children because they don’t want them, or do they not want what they’ve been conditioned to believe children are? Vox reports that Taiwan has spent more than $3 billion trying to convince its citizens to have more children. That includes the addition of six months of paid parental leave reimbursed at 80% of the parent’s salary, as well as a...

Compared to the flu vaccine, covid injections are associated with a significant increase in adverse events among women of reproductive age. Data revealed a 27-fold higher risk of miscarriage and a more than twofold increased risk of adverse foetal outcomes across six different categories following covid injections.Covid injection contents are biodistributed into the bloodstream within hours and cross “all physiologic barriers including the maternal-placental-foetal barrier and the blood-brain barriers in both the mother and the foetus.”Birth rates in multiple European countries fell significantly at the end of 2021, months after covid injections became widely utilised.Researchers have called for the immediate...

Russia launched its first huge missile wave on Ukrainian cities in weeks. The missiles killed at least nine civilians and cut electricity supplies in several cities. Ukraine’s military said its forces repelled over a hundred Russian attacks in Bakhmut in the past 24 hours. Meanwhile as the war rages on, the birth rate in Ukraine has dropped sharply since Russia’s invasion. Population of Ukraine is about 43 million and of these about 8 million left after the invasion. From the people who left almost all were women as men have limits on leaving due to conscription. CNBC-TV18’s Sanjay Suri gets...

US birth rates are alarmingly low. Recent studies show a disturbingly sharp decline in the number of babies being born in America. CBS News: Data collected by the National Center for Health Statistics — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s statistic arm — showed a sharp decline in fertility rates in recent years, with most women having an average of 1.3 babies and an increasing percentage giving birth at age 35 or older.

(The opinions expressed by contributors are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of RedState.com.)I remember being on a golf course talking politics and a friend “jokingly” called me a “breeder.” I have four kids; he’s chosen to forgo parenthood altogether.After a moment of stunned silence, I realized two things: one, that there are plenty of folks who think that having children is evil, and two, that this person was not in fact my friend.He’s not alone in his thinking though: a survey by Veolia, an environmental utility firm, reveals that a quarter of respondents described “not being...

The fact-checkers at the ABC jumped to the government’s rescue when I asked a few pointed questions about the reported decline in birth rates following the national Covid vaccine roll-out. ‘It has been four weeks since the Australian Bureau of Statistics published data showing a 70 per cent reduction in Australia’s monthly birthrate between July and December 2021 as compared to the long-term average – a startling decrease. I drew attention to this data during Senate estimates, hoping for some reassurance. None was forthcoming. Let me ask again: Minister [Gallagher], why has Australia’s birthrate declined from 30 June 2021 to...

Replacing babies with pets stifles a person’s capacity to give and receive love, as it wrongly directs our greatest earthly affections toward ourselves.In a recent Fox News piece, sociologist Andrea Laurent-Simpson writes of the emergence of “multispecies families,” explaining that in “child-free families…dogs and cats paw in to fill a longing to nurture” and would-be grandparents “readily shift over to spoiling the granddog as their daughters and sons choose instead to pursue lucrative careers.” But this is neither good nor new.The ancient historian Plutarch began his life of Pericles with an anecdote about Caesar, who, upon seeing “wealthy foreigners in...