Free Republic

What really predicted fertility, the authors find, are attitudes about work and family.The world’s richest countries typically have the world’s lowest birth rates. The highest-income people in those wealthy countries on average have the smallest family sizes. Those two facts conflict with the broad perception, especially among lawmakers, that Americans aren’t having babies because they’re worried about how expensive kids are. So may the results of a new study out today, which finds that the more career-oriented individuals and wealthy societies become, the more their fertility declines. “Highly work-focused values and social attitudes among both men and women are strongly...

June 18, 2015 (ThePublicDiscourse) -- I’m growing weary of being told that I must either support gay marriage or disavow my own marriage. I refer not to anything my wife and I did that would violate the traditional norms of marriage, but to something we had no control over: our ongoing inability to conceive a child. My wife and I, along with all other childless heterosexual couples, often find ourselves presented as exhibit A in the court of public opinion. Our plight has become a standard response to the main reason for traditional marriage, a reason that until lately was...

Our neighbors told us that their sons and wives (all of whom are Catholic and educated in Catholic elementary and high schools), each couple with two children apiece, don’t plan to have any more children and to make certain everyone recently had surgical procedures performed to prevent conception. The sons had vasectomies and their wives had their fallopian tubes sutured. Our friends think this is a form of birth control, and we agree with them. Has the Church addressed this matter? Without question, the couples in question clearly intended to disregard the Church’s teaching on contraception and did so by...