Canada’s total fertility rate fell again last year, reaching a record low of 1.25 children per woman, following years of decline.
Published Wednesday, new data from Statistics Canada show the birth rate slipping 1.6 per cent from 2023; the first year that fertility rates fell below 1.3 children per woman.
Coincidentally last night’s 4 am can’t sleep random Youtube videos … Birthgap
To boost birth rates, we need to address the narratives that demean family life.
Over the past few decades, birth rates have plummeted in the West. A recent Financial Times article reported that the decline in fertility has been much steeper among progressives than conservatives.
The fertility drop began in the 1960s. While some attribute it to “climate anxiety” or economic pressures, cultural changes offer a better explanation.
An NBC poll found this week that male Donald Trump voters under the age of 30 rank “having children” first among 13 options when asked what is most important to their “personal definition of success”. Female Kamala Harris voters, by contrast, put “having children” in 12th place. Zoomer women were less likely than their male counterparts to rank children as important, but the bigger difference was between Trump and Harris voters.
The conservative group behind the Project 2025 governing playbook for President Donald Trump’s second term is set to propose sweeping revisions to U.S. economic policy meant to encourage married heterosexual couples to have more children.
The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank headquartered a stone’s throw from the U.S. Capitol, wants lawmakers to create new government-seeded savings accounts — for married people only.
It hopes to steer funding for child care away from programs like Head Start and toward individual families — specifically to encourage parents to stay home and rear children.
And the group wants Trump to issue executive orders requiring all proposed policies and regulations to “measure their positive or negative impacts and marriage and family” — then overhaul or end programs that score poorly.
Democrats like murdering babies far too much.
Would anyone be surprised if they were? After all, progressives have spent decades championing abortion at all phases of pregnancy right up to birth — and sometimes immediately after. Over the last decade, they have taken up the Queer Movement’s transgender campaign and demanded pediatric sex-change therapies that leave adolescents neutered for life. Their climate-change agenda emphasizes the need for population reversal and rails over the insult to Gaia that human procreation creates.
They’re not exactly kid-friendly, in other words. But don’t just rely on instincts and political posturing on this question, because actual data shows that progressives practice what they preach. Financial Times analyst John Burn-Murdoch reviews the results of a study on declining birth rates in the developed world, including the US, and the impact of political ideology on procreation. While those rates are declining in all categories, they are collapsing among progressives.
This is the link to the FT piece by Murdoch – Why progressives should care about falling birth rates
The British fertility rate fell to its lowest level on record in 2024 after falling for three straight years as the native public continues to delay or refrain from having children.
Figures released on Wednesday from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) found that the total fertility rate (TFR) stood at 1.41 children per woman in 2024 for England and Wales.
If humanity’s existence were threatened by plague, nuclear war or environmental catastrophe, people would surely demand action.
But what if the threat came from our own, passive acceptance of decline? This is not some theoretical curiosity: It is a reasonable extrapolation of globally declining fertility rates.
People aren’t demanding action. In fact, some think a smaller population is actually a good thing.
Dean Spears and Michael Geruso, economists at the University of Texas at Austin specializing in demographics, want to change that. Their book “After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People” is a deep dive into the facts and consequences of depopulation, and an impassioned argument against letting it happen.
They rest their argument not on the familiar need for workers to propel economic growth or shore up Social Security but on a more fundamental proposition: More people is a good thing in and of itself.
You can’t have a country without children.
Forget pandemics. Forget war. South Korea is dying by choice. Not a bomb, not a plague, not even bad luck. A slow, quiet vanishing. It’s not falling to enemies; it’s falling to itself.
Over the next century, South Korea’s population is projected to decline to just 7.5 million. That’s not a typo. That’s an 85 percent collapse: 51 million people, down to seven and a half. Picture America with the population of California, minus everyone else. Now imagine that across the entire continent. Ghost cities. Empty homes. Schools boarded up. Airports with no flights. Subways running on time — for no one. It sounds like dystopian fiction. Sadly, though, it’s a reality that has already begun.
A cultural sickness is causing women to not have children.
The U.S. faces a crisis that has yet to make itself widely known: Women are having fewer and fewer children with each passing year. Whereas in 2007 the U.S. averaged 2.12 births per woman, that number has continuously fallen ever since, decreasing in 2023 to reach another record low of 1.62 births per woman. That’s well, well below replacement levels.
The fertility crisis has yet to make a significant impact on the U.S. economy, but according to a report released this week by Pew, we are beginning to see the first effects of the crisis on state budgets.
It was easy to miss a minor blip in the cacophonous “great give-away” during this year’s federal election: the Liberal Party’s promise to expand financial support for in vitro fertilization (IVF) under the umbrella of its “Pathways to Parenthood” plan, which earmarked $400 million to ease access to the service. The monies will be disbursed through a series of payments (up to $20,000 per person) for a single round of treatment. The goal is, in part, to make IVF equally accessible across the nation.
But the government is also responding to the increasingly well-documented disparity between people’s desire for children and their ability to fulfill these aspirations. In an economic context often cited as hostile to childbearing, relieving any financial barriers to family life is as good a place to start as any when it comes to framing family-forward policy.
The 21st century is going to be overshadowed by a crisis that human beings have never faced before. I don’t mean war, pestilence, famine or climate change. Those are perennial troubles. Yes, even climate change, despite the hype, is nothing new as anyone who’s heard of the Roman Warm Period, the Mediaeval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age will know. Climate change and the others are certainly problems, but they aren’t new.
But the crisis that’s coming is new.
One day, sooner than we think, we will have to choose: societies that permit and even pay for abortion, or societies that prize and incentivize children. In the long run, we cannot have both. We cannot have a future and kill our children.
THE White British will become a minority by the year 2063. The foreign-born and their descendants will become a majority by 2079. And by the year 2100, at least one in five people on these islands will be following the Islamic faith, up from roughly one in every 14 today.
These are just a few of the bombshell findings from my latest research report, which received extensive media coverage.
Population projections are notoriously difficult.
In all countries, 39% of people said financial limitations prevented them from having a child.
Namrata Nangia and her husband have been toying with the idea of having another child since their five-year-old daughter was born.
But it always comes back to one question: ‘Can we afford it?’
She lives in Mumbai and works in pharmaceuticals, her husband works at a tyre company. But the costs of having one child are already overwhelming – school fees, the school bus, swimming lessons, even going to the GP is expensive.
It was different when Namrata was growing up. “We just used to go to school, nothing extracurricular, but now you have to send your kid to swimming, you have to send them to drawing, you have to see what else they can do.”
The country has had nine consecutive years of declining births despite government efforts to halt the demographic crisis
It was a story of extraordinary national renewal. After decades in the grip of military imperial rule, millions dead in a war that traversed oceans and two cities flattened by atom bombs, the Japanese people picked themselves up and made babies.
Between 1945 and 1965, a nascent democracy flourished, the economy boomed and Japan’s population rocketed from 72 million to almost 100 million. By the turn of the millennium, the mountainous archipelago, the vast majority of whose population is squeezed into lower-lying coastal areas, was home to 127 million people, four times the population of Canada, which is 26 times larger.
