Tag Archives: Topic: Demographics

The Guardian: Unless the federal government or supreme court act, southern states will most likely oppose gay marriage for the foreseeable future . . . Indeed, demographic models indicate that if put up for a vote, same-sex marriage would become legal in all but six states by 2020! Even Mississippi is projected to be up to near 40% support on the issue, gaining a little over 1.5pt per year. So the whole thing should be over soon, right? Not likely.

The Independent: report published by the Office for National Statistics revealed that the percentage of people following a Christian faith dropped from 71.7 per cent in 2001 to 59.3 per cent in 2011. More than one in 10 under 25s in the UK now describe themselves as Muslim.

Catherine Rampell at NY Times: The share of births to unmarried mothers is up, according to a new report from the Census Bureau.

Radio Free Europe: Georgia faces a serious and growing demographic problem. According to the United Nations, the ratio of newborn boys to girls in 1991 was 105 to 100. By 2000, it was nearly 110 to 100. And in 2011, it was almost 114 to 100.

Globe and Mail: While the Christian faith continues to dominate Canada’s immigrant profile, its proportion has been steadily fading. Where more than 78 per cent of immigrants to Canada prior to 1971 identified themselves as Christians, that proportion has dropped to 47.5 per cent among those who arrived over the past five years, the survey found.

CNS News: And, as the poll suggests, young people share this belief: 66 percent of the students polled had a positive opinion of “entrepreneurship,” 44 percent found “free markets” positive, and 42 percent believe the federal government is an opponent rather than a partner in the pursuit of the American Dream.

The Barna Group: One common thread in every survey has been the significant number of Millennials among these “Nones.” The initial Pew survey found that nearly one-in-three members of the Millennial generation (32%) has no religious affiliation. But, who are these faithless twentysomethings? Where did they come from? Did they ever claim faith? And what is it about religion that has left them cold?

LiveScience: “This is because traditional economic models of marriage have argued that men who have high earning potential are more likely to marry at an older age so that they can ‘reveal’ their high potential,” explained Hani Mansour, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Colorado Denver. [I Don't: 5 Myths About Marriage]

The Hill: If you want to know how effective Cecile Richards is, just ask her opponents.
As the president of Planned Parenthood — both its clinical operations and its political advocacy arm — Richards, who recently sat down for an interview with The Hill, is no stranger to controversy.

Religion Clause Blog: The Pew Forum yesterday released a 226-page report titled The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society. Based on surveys in 39 countries between 2008 and 2012, it examines the social and political views of Muslims around the world. Here is an excerpt from the Executive Summary . . .

The Volokh Conspiracy has posted a very interesting fact and graphic.

Breitbart (also on the Drudge Report) : A woman in Spain recently gave birth to the first child born in the village of Los Giles in 45 years, causing a stir in the village.

Jonathan Adler at the Volokh Conspiracy: The latest installment of the Washington Post‘s “Five Myths” series takes on abortion. Number three among the “Five Myths about Abortion” identified by author Rickie Solinger is “Roe led to a huge increase in the number of abortions.” Here is Solinger’s explanation for why this is a “myth” . . .

Business Insider: These trends create an even higher demand for education among women. Education is insurance against divorce risk, but it also creates more unstable marriages, which in turn increases demand for more education. And since the marriage market is filled with more educated women, it’s more difficult for uneducated women to find a mate — making the marriage market more competitive.

Christian Post: The Florida House of Representatives Thursday passed a bill, 71-44, that would make it a crime for abortion providers to knowingly provide an abortion to a customer seeking to abort their fetus because of his or her race or gender. Some Democratic lawmakers walked out of the House chambers in protest as the bill was debated. The bill, H.B. 845 . . .

Tonika Reed of Baptist Press at BRNow.org: “What has changed is not our conception of what the ideal family is but our ability to achieve it,” said Last. Steve Aden, senior counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, asked if this problem was one of inherent selfishness among those who are able but choose not to have children. Last said America’s problem stems from “hyper-responsibility,” not selfishness. He said those who want to move up economically usually choose to go to school longer, postponing the rates of marriage and childbirth.

The Christian Institute: Fiona Bruce, MP for Congleton, said in the debate on Tuesday that if they are to condemn the gender abortion practices of China and India, they must “be ready to condemn and challenge any suggestion that gendercide is taking place in the UK”.

WorldBulletin.net: While Muslims and Jews came to Mexico early in the colonial period as ‘false Christians,’ approximately half the Muslims in Mexico today are among the rising number of converts, or reverts.

Tonika Reed at Baptist Press: Steve Aden, senior counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, asked if this problem was one of inherent selfishness among those who are able but choose not to have children.

Baptist Press also posted at Townhall: Now that the future of marriage is center stage, Kellie Fiedorek hopes that the Supreme Court does not offer a radical ruling that cuts short the debate. A lawyer with Alliance Defending Freedom, Fiedorek, 29, sat in the courtroom as the justices heard the arguments. She’s been to seven states this year testifying before legislatures about the ways redefining marriage would interfere with religious freedom. She’s learned that many citizens have never had to think about the meaning of marriage and why it matters. Now that people are alert, social conservatives have the opportunity to make their case to a young generation that has both rallied for life and dealt with the aftereffects of divorce. “I think that, as more young people engage in the issue, we will see more of them eager to defend marriage, recognizing how important it is to parents and children,” Fiedorek said.

NBC: By a 49 percent to 43 percent margin, Latinos say they are in favor of allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry. That’s the widest margin for Hispanics in the NBC/WSJ poll’s history, but it lags behind other traditionally Democratic-voting pillars.

Barna Group: The rise of the so-called “Nones”—the increasing percentage of adults who claim no religious affiliation—has been a much-discussed trend in American religion. Is the nation moving away from Christianity and other forms of conventional faith? To provide insight on this topic, Barna Group analyzed 42,855 interviews conducted in recent years, looking at 15 different measures of non-religiosity. In other words, the research explores the emerging post-Christian landscape of the nation.

Reuters: Two retired senior Chinese officials are engaged in a battle with one another to sway Beijing’s new leadership over the future of the one-child policy, exposing divisions that have impeded progress in a crucial area of reform.

LifeNews: “We do have some sense in that with perinatal infant mortality data it is recorded,” Rep. Pigman told legislators on the panel. “In 2010, there were 24,586 perinatal deaths in the United States. Perinatal defines as being from the 22nd week of gestation to seven days post delivery.”

Meg McDonnell at Public Discourse: Young adults desire stable marriage and family life even while they engage in unmarried sex and parenting. We should encourage and help young adults achieve these goals instead of trying to make birth control “sexy.”

LifeSiteNews: “Gay marriage is inevitable.” That’s what we’re told by gay activists. It’s a taunt devised to pick off the more faint-hearted clingers-on of traditional marriage by exploiting the human instinct to be on the winning side. And sometimes it works.

World Magazine: Now that the future of marriage is center stage, Kellie Fiedorek hopes that the Supreme Court does not offer a radical ruling that cuts short the debate. A lawyer with Alliance Defending Freedom, Fiedorek, 29, sat in the courtroom as the justices heard the arguments. She’s been to seven states this year testifying before legislatures about the ways redefining marriage would interfere with religious freedom. She’s learned that many citizens have never had to think about the meaning of marriage and why it matters. Now that people are alert, social conservatives have the opportunity to make their case to a young generation that has both rallied for life and dealt with the aftereffects of divorce. “I think that, as more young people engage in the issue, we will see more of them eager to defend marriage, recognizing how important it is to parents and children,” Fiedorek said.

David Blankenhorn and Jonathan Rauch at NY Daily News: Gay marriage is here. It is already part of our social fabric. But don’t savor the moment for too long. There’s much more to marriage equality than gay marriage equality. Marriage today is fracturing along class lines.

Susan L. Brown at LA Times: The Beatles sang ‘Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m 64?’ When it comes to marriage, many baby boomers are saying ‘no.’ . . . Until recently, it would have been fair to say that older people simply did not get divorced. Fewer than 10% of those who got divorced in 1990 were ages 50 or older. Today, 1 in 4 people getting divorced is in this age group.

NCPA Policy Digest: Jonathan Last’s recent book, What to Expect When Nobody’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster, notes that increasing college attendance, the delay of marriage, the birth control pill, religious participation, the rise of the thousand-dollar stroller and Social Security are some reasons fertility is falling, says Michael Rosen of the American.

Cliff Kincaid at Canada Free Press: A big news story came out of Tuesday’s March for Marriage demonstration in Washington, D.C. But it didn’t make “news” in the major media. As one who covered the event, it was significant that there were so many members of minority groups. This was not a mostly white crowd. In addition to the presence of black, Hispanic and Asian supporters of traditional marriage, there were some notable Democrats, such as New York State Senator Ruben Díaz, and he let people know he was several minorities in one.

Prague Daily Monitor: The portion of people aged over 65 increased from 19.1 percent to 23.4 percent of the Czech population over the past 20 years. The EU average rose from 21.1 to 26.8 percent over the same period.

Politico: “There is a split,” said Santorum, on the views of younger Republicans on gay marriage and abortion. “But the marriage issue is still a very new issue in America, and people said in the 1970s it was just a matter of time before everybody became pro-choice. So, I think we’ll see the pendulum swing back once young conservatives see the real consequences to the destruction of marriage.”

LifeSiteNews: A Pew Research Forum this month found that 70 percent of those born after 1981 favor marriage redefinition. No other generation crossed the threshold of 50 percent.

LifeNews: After reading the article, I asked Dr. Brian Clowes, director of education and research at Human Life International, to investigate the number of worldwide abortions since 1973. The results were staggering! He estimates that there have been more than 1.72 billion abortions over the last 40 years, a trend that is not lessening but growing exponentially as more and more countries embrace and legalize contraception and abortion as methods of population control, which is always sold as “family planning” and “reproductive health.”

Family Research Council: The magnitude of these figures is staggering. By comparison, at present there are 315 million people living in the United States. Rabinovitch does not really tell where the data came from within the Chinese government, but these are pretty specific numbers that make sense. In short, we are talking about a maximum of 336 million Chinese who would be under the age of 42 – the peak working years.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: An article from Keith Riler at First Things fleshes out the long term effects of population control efforts among the poor in America. Riler suggests that the FED and States should gladly spend $11,000 worth of Medicare on births among poor Americans, rather then spend for family planning. Riler sees it as an investment.

Business Insider: It’s what I like to call “the most depressing slide I’ve ever created.” In almost every country you look at, the peak in real estate prices has coincided – give or take literally a couple of years – with the peak in the inverse dependency ratio (the proportion of population of working age relative to old and young). In the past, we all levered up, bought a big house, enjoyed capital gains tax-free, lived in the thing, and then, when the kids grew up and left home, we sold it to someone in our children’s generation. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work so well when there start to be more pensioners than workers.

LifeSiteNews: Data from the World Health Organization (WHO) shows that Romania has one of the highest abortion rates in Europe with 480 abortions for every 1,000 live births—a figure that is double the official EU abortion average. In 1990, Romania’s ration of abortions to live births was a horrific three to one. Today, Romania’s abortion rate is second only to Russia’s in Europe.

Ezra Klein at Washington Post: A more accurate way to put it would be that in the coming decades, new spending is almost entirely driven by health-care programs. But what’s really driving the spending in those programs is the aging of the population, not the rise in health-care costs.

Washington Post: That rapid change — particularly on what had long been a divisive social issue — is remarkable in an age of politics where the entrenchment of the two parties seems close to permanent. And, it begs the question: What the heck happened? The answer comes in two parts — one well understood, the other less so.

Atlanta Blackstar: African-American teenage abortion rates are more than twice as high as the national average, according to a new study . . . The rate is also four times higher than the teen abortion rate among non-Hispanic whites, which sits at 10 per 1,000 women, and twice as high as the Hispanic rate of 20 per 1,000.

Michael Barone at National Review: If opinion continues to move toward same-sex marriage, it will be a tough issue for Republicans, since most of their voters currently are opposed. But it will be a tough issue for some Democrats as well, since many black voters are staunchly opposed.

International Business Times: Researchers from the University of California-San Diego School of Medicine have just released a study in which they declared that the cultural preference for sons over daughters is even more of an intractable problem in Nepal than …

AP: A record number of U.S. counties – more than 1 in 3 – are now dying off, hit by an aging population and weakened local economies that are spurring young adults to seek jobs and build families elsewhere.

LifeSiteNews: All Western countries have birthrates below the replacement rates, suggesting that soon all countries will experience a graying of, and a decline in, population. Jonathan Last asks why this has happened in his new book, the cleverly titled What to Expect When No One’s Expecting, putting demographic decline in a broader context.

Foreign Policy: The initiative committe is led by politician Heinz Hürzeler, a member of the country’s Social Liberal Movement, and maintains that in Switzerland, where 12 percent of pregnancies end in abortion, the practice represents a huge blow to the economy (comparatively speaking, Switzerland has one of the lowest abortion rates in the world, with only 6.4 abortions for every 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44)

Scott Yenor at Public Discourse: Jonathan Last’s new book attributes population decline and the birth dearth to two trends that started in the Enlightenment era–first, an effort to limit death; second, an effort to control birth. Both trends are guided by a desire to control nature.

Tampa Bay Times: “While other factors such as growing unemployment played a role, there is a strong case that redefining marriage is mostly responsible for the decline,” Sheedy said. We wanted to examine his theory.

Rod Dreher at the American Conservative: The problem for people my age is this: your definition of marriage was displaced prior to our lifetime. I have no memory of when that definition was true. Virtually everyone under the age of 30 has lived their entire lives under a culture that believes marriage is an expression of romantic love between two people.

National Review: We’re in a serious enough demographic bind that we’re all going to have to work together to figure out a way to make this thing work. The thing is, when your fertility rate is sub-replacement, you enter a zero-sum game where either older folks aren’t going to get the benefits they were promised or young workers are going to face much steeper tax rates. How the politics of this issue resolves over the next 20 years will be one of the most interesting stories around. Will older Americans relinquish some of their claims? Will younger workers volunteer to pay more? Will there be some grand bargain? The truth is, no one knows how it will end. We just know that something has to give.

The Daily Beast: More and more Americans are childless by choice. But what makes sense for the individual may spell disaster for the country as a whole . . . It’s time for us to consider what an aging, increasingly child-free population, growing more slowly, would mean here. As younger Americans individually eschew families of their own, they are contributing to the ever-growing imbalance between older retirees—basically their parents—and working-age Americans, potentially propelling both into a spiral of soaring entitlement costs and diminished economic vigor and creating a culture marked by hyperindividualism and dependence on the state as the family unit erodes.

Politico: State demographers say California’s Hispanic population will equal that of whites within six months and exceed it early next year — a milestone in the country’s racial and ethnic shifts.

Stefano Gennarini at C-FAM: A major disagreement among demographic experts threatens to upend efforts to include population control and family planning programs in the United Nations new development agenda. Experts who view population growth as an obstacle to development are criticizing the “laissez-faire attitude” of developing countries toward population growth and high fertility. Yet other experts disagree, saying that population control and family planning are not essential to development strategies.

Barna Group: From its place in schools, to the public square, to people’s individual lives, the current and future role of the Bible in U.S. society is an often-debated topic. A new release from Barna Group shows how this debate plays out regionally and takes a look at how 96 of the largest cities in the nation view the Bible.

Reuters: “If this goes on, there will be no taxpayers, no workers and no caregivers for the elderly,” said Gu Baochang, a demography professor at Renmin University.

LifeNews: The United States marks 40 years of legalized abortion in all fifty states at any time for any reason throughout pregnancy on January 22nd, the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. Since that time, there have been approximately 55,772,015 abortions that have destroyed the lives of unborn children.

Commentary Magazine: What we’re seeing is a rapid hollowing out of marriage in Middle America–with 44 percent of the children of moderately-educated mothers born outside of marriage. “We’re at a tipping point with Middle America,” W. Bradford Wilcox, a leading scholar on marriage, told National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez, “insofar as Middle Americans are on the verge of losing their connection to marriage.”

Investor’s Business Daily: In 1970, children made up 33% of California’s population, a number that’s expected to shrink to just over a fifth by 2030, a report by the University of Southern California and the Lucile Packard Foundation shows. That year California averaged about 21 seniors per 100 working age adults. By 2030, that number is predicted to rise to 36% of working age adults . . . The state’s birthrate fell to 1.94 children per woman in 2010, below the replacement level of 2.1 children, according to the study, and lower than the overall U.S. rate of 2.06 children in 2012.

LifeSiteNews: The number of children living in single-parent homes has nearly doubled since 1960, according to data from the 2010 Census.

LifeNews: The new report released by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) shows the abortion giant did a record 333,964 abortions on unborn children during the 2011-2012 fiscal year. Those abortions were estimated to have generated $150 million dollars for the “nonprofit” organization.

LifeSiteNews: This is an astonishing comment given that Lord Steele remains supportive of abortion, but it reflects concerns regarding the staggering number of abortions carried out in Britain – up to 200,000 every single year, with some 20 percent of all pregnancies ended by abortion.

Janice Shaw Crouse at the Washington Times: How many abortions, legal and illegal, are performed annually, nationally and worldwide? The answer depends upon whom you ask and whether the data come from the United States or from developing nations. More important, it depends on the assumptions, methodology and honesty of those compiling the numbers. Recent research calls into question data that heretofore had been considered authoritative.

Joe Carter at LifeSiteNews: Economic growth is therefore not, as McCarraher claims, the “beatific vision of the capitalist moral imagination.” It’s neither a goal that should be pursued for its own sake nor a means to achieve a materialist paradise. Economic growth is not the chief end of man, but merely the blessing that results from fulfilling God’s cultural mandate.

AP: As a whole, the U.S. population grew by 2.3 million, reaching 313.9 million people. That growth of 0.75 percent was higher than the 0.73 percent rate in 2011, ending five years of slowing growth rates. Nevertheless, growth levels remains stuck at historically low levels not seen since 1937, restrained by reduced childbirths.

Jonathan Last at the Weekly Standard: The New York Times has finally discovered that fiscal cliffs aren’t the only thing that menace the modern nation-state. There’s a demographic cliff, too.

Kathleen Parker at the Washington Post: “Marriage is not merely a private arrangement; it is also a complex social institution. Marriage fosters small cooperative unions — also known as stable families — that enable children to thrive, shore up communities, and help family members to succeed during good times and to weather the bad times. Researchers are finding that the disappearance of marriage in Middle America is tracking with the disappearance of the middle class in the same communities, a change that strikes at the very heart of the American Dream.”

Interfax: The share of Orthodox believers in the country has dropped by 6%, from 80% in 2009, while the share of Muslims has grown by 3% to 7% in the same period.

Reuters: It showed Christianity is the most evenly spread religion, present in all regions of the world, while Hinduism is the least global with 94 percent of its population in one country, India.

LifeNews: National and state abortion reporting laws and policies in the United States are a patchwork that falls far short of fulfilling the potential of this information to inform and guide public policy.

Gatestone Institute: The census data shows that the number of Christians in England and Wales declined by 11% (4.1 million) during the past decade, from 37.3 million in 2001 to 33.2 million in 2011. During the same period, the Muslim population in England and Wales increased by 80% (1.2 million), from 1.5 million in 2001 to 2.7 million in 2011, making it the second-largest religion in Britain.

LifeNews: National and state abortion reporting laws and policies in the United States are a patchwork that falls far short of fulfilling the potential of this information to inform and guide public policy. The composite picture they reveal is at once impressionistic and incomplete, non-contemporaneous and of limited use in providing a true and timely rendering of the impact of public policies and attitudes on the reality of abortion in the United States

Jeff Jacoby at Townhall: Fertility in America has been declining for years. According to the Pew Research Center, the nation’s birth rate hit an all-time low in 2011 – just 63 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age. It was almost twice as high – 123 births per 1,000 women – at the peak of the Baby Boom in 1957.

Reuters on Yahoo News: The number of Christians in England and Wales declined by 13 percent over the past decade, while the non-religious population grew from 15 to 25 percent, the most recent national census has revealed.

AP: Some 59 percent of residents said they were Christian, compared with 72 percent in 2001. A quarter said they had no religion, up from 15 percent a decade earlier.