Free Republic

Adding a city the size of Philadelphia in just one year hardly means we are on the cusp of a decline in population, as The New York Times article suggests. A recent news article by Sabrina Tavernise in The New York Times warned U.S. population growth has slowed so much that the Wuhan virus might tip the country into population decline this year. It is the latest in a string of articles, editorials, and columns recently that mislead the public about the nation’s demographic future. Like other writers, Tavernise anchors her warnings by pointing out that the rate of U.S....

NEW YORK, January 10 (C-Fam) Even with adjustments for longer, healthier living, the UN’s latest population figures show rapid aging and economic unpreparedness across the globe. By each of the three metrics used in the latest UN report on aging, only Africa is projected to avoid the harsh effects of aging in the coming decades, a world where the number of elderly is projected to more than double, reaching more than 1.5 billion. According to World Population Prospects 2019, by 2050, one in six people will be over the age of 65, up from one in eleven in 2019, as...

Editor’s Note: The following address was delivered by Don Feder, communications director for the World Congress of Families, at the International Forum: Large Family and the Future of Humanity in Moscow September 10-12, 2014. If current trends continue, we won’t run out of energy or other natural resources in the foreseeable future. We will run out of people. This global catastrophe will be the result of rapidly declining fertility, known as Demographic Winter. In 1960, worldwide, the average woman had 5 children. Now, that number is 2.6 and falling – in other words, a decline of almost 50 percent in...

Young women just aren’t that crazy about babies any more, shunning the diaper changes and midnight feedings for dubbed-in family members that don’t demand as much care: dogs. And not just any type dog — specifically, those that weigh less than 25 pounds. “I’d rather have a dog over a kid,” said Sara Foster, 30, the proud owner of a French bulldog named Maddie, the New York Post reported. “It’s just less work and, honestly, I have more time to go out. You … don’t have to get a baby sitter.” Her view is being repeated across the nation by...

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...

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...

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...

To President Barack Obama and many other Democrats, Europe continues to exercise something of a fatal attraction. The “European dream” embraced by these politicians — as well as by many pundits, academics and policy analysts — usually consists of an America governed by an expanded bureaucracy, connected by high-speed trains and following a tough green energy policy. One hopes that the current crisis gripping the E.U. will give even the most devoted Europhiles pause about the wisdom of such mimicry. Yet the deadliest European disease the U.S. must avoid is that of persistent demographic decline. The gravity of Europe’s demographic...

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),...

At a huge rally in the capital, Cardinal Antonio Rouco, the leader of Spain's Roman Catholics, told protesters the birth rate in Europe will be depleted unless Christian values are maintained.Catholics attended a huge open air mass beside Real Madrid's Bernabeu stadium.The mass marked the Feast of the Holy Family. But Catholic leaders from across Europe joined their local counterparts and members of the Spanish centre-Right opposition to castigate the socialist government's policies."Europe will be practically without children," warned Cardinal Rouco, 73, the conservative Archbishop of Madrid. "Who denies to defend a human being so innocent and weak, already conceived...

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- A population expert who has chronicled the underpopulation crisis threatening the globe says a British environmental advisor is relying on faulty logic in his call for families there to be limited to two children. John Porritt, chair of the a governmental commission, says any more than two children is "irresponsible."But Barry McLerran, producer of the acclaimed documentary "Demographic Winter" said Porrit's advice is "based on faulty logic of the 1960s population-control movement."While Porritt claims Britain is undergoing a massive population influx that could cause environmental problems, McLerran says the nation actually has too few people.In...

BRUSSELS, August 29, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Population statistics and projections were released yesterday showing that European countries are dying out, even with immigration, their populations aging and shrinking.  A report released this week by Eurostat, the European Union's statistical service, showed that by 2015, the number of deaths in Europe will have outstripped the number of births.  By 2060, the ratio of people of working age to those over age 65 will be two to one. None of the countries of Europe currently have a general fertility rate above replacement level and it is predicted that what is being called...

There are four things in America for which there is little forgiveness. The first is killing your wife, as O.J. Simpson discovered. The second is allegations of child molestation, as Michael Jackson found. The third is being old, as John McCain is rapidly discovering. And the fourth is having too many children, as I have found. Looking down at primitives with "too many" children is one of the last acceptable prejudices in the West. With our ninth child expected imminently, God willing, I find myself pitied and pilloried wherever I go. "Wow, that's a lot of kids," is a refrain...

According to Kathryn Joyce, sneer-and-smear artist for The Nation, those who are concerned about the worldwide decline in birthrates are -- to put it mildly -- racist, neo-Nazis, who have a hidden agenda and (under the guise of demographic winter) are engaged in our age-old quest to control women's bodies. The Nation is this nation's oldest and largest-circulation left-wing journal (outside of The New York Times, of course). Joyce's screed, "Missing: The 'Right' Babies," will appear in the March 3 print edition, but is currently available online. Joyce believes -- with the faith of one immune to facts and logic...

According to Kathryn Joyce, sneer-and-smear artist for The Nation, those who are concerned about the worldwide decline in birthrates are -- to put it mildly -- racist, neo-Nazis, who have a hidden agenda and (under the guise of demographic winter) are engaged in our age-old quest to control women's bodies. The Nation is this nation's oldest and largest-circulation leftwing journal (outside of The New York Times, of course). Joyce's screed, "Missing: The 'Right' Babies," will appear in the March 3 print edition, but is currently available online. Joyce believes -- with the faith of one immune to facts and logic...

As I say, the above demographic audit has become something of an annual tradition in this space. But here's something new that took hold in the year 2007: A radical antihumanism, long present just below the surface, bobbed up and became explicit and respectable. In Britain, the Optimum Population Trust said that "the biggest cause of climate change is climate changers – in other words, human beings," and professor John Guillebaud called on Britons to voluntarily reduce the number of children they have. "Every person who is born," says Toni Vernelli, "produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases and...