Tag Archives: Topic: Demographics

Religion Clause Blog: The FBI today released its 2011 Hate Crime Statistics. The report shows that there were 6,216 single-bias motivated incidents reported, of which 1,233 (19.8%) involved religious bias.

Christian Institute: More very premature babies are surviving “than ever before”, figures published in the British Medical Journal show. Overall, for babies born between 22 and 25 weeks, chances of survival increased from 40 per cent to 53 per cent between 1995 and 2006. For babies born at 23 weeks the chances of survival rose by 9.5 per cent. The abortion limit is 24 weeks.

Philip Cohen at The Atlantic: ”As the role of the extended family, religious rules, and other institutional pressures declines,” he wrote, “choices are increasingly free to be matters of taste.” Mary—both a traditional American name and a symbol religious Christianity—embodies this trend.

AFP: The sperm count of French men plunged by a third between 1989 and 2005, a finding which fuels concern that environmental pollutants or lifestyle are crimping fertility, scientists said on Wednesday.

Ross Douthat at NY Times: IN the eternally recurring debates about whether some rival great power will knock the United States off its global perch, there has always been one excellent reason to bet on a second American century: We have more babies than the competition.

National Journal: In 2011, the overall birth rate was 63.2 per 1,000 women of childbearing age, the lowest since at least 1920, Pew reported, citing numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics. The birth rate reached 122.7 in 1957, the peak of the Baby Boom.

Randy O’Bannon at Life News: When abortions drop, for whatever reason, that’s a big deal. Precious unborn lives have been saved and their mothers saved from making a terrible mistake.

Steve Aden on the Bob Dutko Show WMUZ 103.5FM in Detroit. | MP3 audio 8:02 mins

LifeNews: Abortion numbers, rates, and ratios for 2009 have been released by the government’s Centers for Disease Control (CDC), indicating significantly fewer abortions than found in the previous year’s report. And while the decrease is most welcomed, the abortion industry likes to act as if women no longer died from abortion once it became legal. In fact, CDC reports that twelve more women died in 2008, the most recent year for which the CDC had data, and more than 400 women have died from legal abortion since 1973.

Human Life International Truth and Charity Forum: There is no baby-boom – there is a birth-dearth. And, yes, there is economic stagnation and looming long-term economic decline, but this is exacerbated (or perhaps caused by) the decline in birth rates.

LifeNews: New York Times magazine noticed the fertility gap with an article that shows women with families and women with larger families are more likely to vote Republican.

Akron Beacon Journal Online: Ohio women are having fewer abortions in the state. Induced abortions dropped 12 percent last year, hitting an all-time low since the Ohio Department of Health started tracking them more than 35 years ago.

AP: Mississippi had the lowest abortion rate, at 4 per 1,000 women of child-bearing age. The state also had only a couple of abortion providers and has the nation’s highest teen birth rate. New York, second to California in number of abortion providers, had the highest abortion rate, roughly eight times Mississippi’s.

New America Media: But an analysis of national data shows that despite high-profile support from African-American men like President Obama and Jay-Z, political support within the black community for legalizing same-sex marriage is being driven largely by women. The Washington Post notes that nationally, 59 percent of black women now support gay marriage, compared with 42 percent of black men, which the Post terms “a huge gender gap.”

Religion Clause Blog: Pew Forum last week released an analysis of the religious makeup of the new 113th Congress. Protestants hold 56% of the seats in Congress.

Heather MacDonald at National Review: Hispanics will prove to be even more decisive in the victory of Governor Jerry Brown’s Proposition 30, which raised upper-income taxes and the sales tax, than in the Obama election. And California is the wave of the future. A March 2011 poll by Moore Information found that Republican economic policies were a stronger turn-off for Hispanic voters in California than Republican positions on illegal immigration. Twenty-nine percent of Hispanic voters were suspicious of the Republican party on class-warfare grounds . . .

LifeNews: Women’s Rights Without Frontiers President Reggie Littlejohn co-presented the feature-length documentary, “It’s a Girl,” at the European Parliament, together with the film’s director, Evan Grae-Davis. Littlejohn is featured as an expert on China’s One Child Policy in this powerful new documentary exposing gendercide and forced abortion. The event, hosted by MEP Gay Mitchell packed the auditorium.

Religion Clause Blog: Pew Forum yesterday published its preliminary analysis, based on exit polls, of Tuesday’s presidential vote by religion, race and worship attendance.

Juan Williams at Wall Street Journal: The critical political message from President Obama’s re-election victory Tuesday is that he cemented a new coalition of Democrats, led by the Latino vote, which threatens to reduce Republicans to an afterthought in future national elections. Yes, Mr. Obama won with the same group of voters—Hispanics, blacks, Asians, young people and educated women—that brought him to power in 2008 . . . Demography is political destiny and today Democrats have the numbers to prove it.

Newsday: President Barack Obama captured 71 percent of the Hispanic vote as he won a second term, according to a national exit poll. That translated to a 44 percentage-point advantage over Republican challenger Mitt Romney, who won just 27 percent of the Hispanic vote — down from Republican shares of 31 percent in 2008, 44 percent in 2004 and 35 percent in 2000.

National Journal: Based on racial exit-poll data available from select states, Obama would have definitively lost 12 states to Republican nominee Mitt Romney if only white voters mattered. Add another three possible toss-up states and that’s a full 242 possible electoral votes that Obama would not have.

AP: A slim majority of Puerto Ricans sought to change their ties with the United States and become the 51st U.S. state in a non-binding referendum that would require final approval from Congress.

Brian Clowes at LifeSiteNews: Throughout the Twentieth Century, eugenicists promoted abortion and birth control, claiming that if the “lower classes” would only have fewer children, crime would also decline. This was one of the primary themes of Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review, in which Montgomery Mulford wrote that “I am of the belief that the acceptance of birth control by society, and its frank teaching, can help diminish criminal activity!”

The Columbus Dispatch: Following are the abortion views held by leaders of some religious groups.

AP: Out are the super-sized McMansions in far-flung suburbs and in the sprawling Southwest . . . In are new, 300 square-foot “micro” apartments under consideration for wider development in dense cities such as New York, San Francisco, Boston and …

LifeNews: According to human rights activist, Reggie Littlejohn, “Experts estimate that between 160 and 200 million women are missing in the world today because of the sex-selective abortion of baby girls.”

Washington Post: A new Gallup survey, touted as the largest of its kind, estimates that 3.4 percent of American adults identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. The findings, released Thursday, were based on interviews with more than 121,000 people.

Reuters: More than half of Latinos favor same-sex marriage, and Latino Catholics are much more supportive of President Barack Obama than Latino evangelicals, according to a Pew poll on religion and politics released Thursday.

LifeSiteNews: Yesterday was the 96th anniversary of the founding of Planned Parenthood, the largest provider of abortions in the United States. To mark the occasion, a group called Protecting Black Life has released an interactive map that uses the latest census data to show how the abortion provider apparently targets minority neighborhoods with its abortion clinics.

Weekly Standard: Finally, buried deep in the report is the most telling number of all: In the last year the number of “first” births dropped to the lowest level ever recorded in America. What does that mean? It means that we’re slowly bifurcating into a country where there are two kinds of adults: people who have children, and people who do not. The people who have children are inclined to have seconds and thirds. But for the first time in our nation’s history, we’re growing a sizable cohort of adults who remain childless their entire lives.

Benjamin Bull at Townhall: Since Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in January 1973, more than 55 million babies have been aborted in America. If a number like “55 million” is hard to grasp, think of it this way—if you added together the populations of New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, Jacksonville, Indianapolis, and San Francisco, you would only have about 26.1 million people—less than half the number aborted.

Boston Globe: People in China are increasingly worried about corruption, inequality and food safety, according to a survey released Tuesday that also found that about half of Chinese like American ideas about democracy . . . The Communist Party has said repeatedly that pervasive corruption threatens its hold on power.

LifeNews: As Planned Parenthood marks its 96th anniversary today, new research shows the abortion business targets blacks and Hispanics by putting 79% of its abortion clinics in minority neighborhoods.

LifeSiteNews: As Bradford Wilcox, a leading sociologist at the University of Virginia and Director of the National Marriage Project found in 2007, active, conservative members of both Protestant and Catholic churches are significantly less likely to divorce—by 35 and 31 percent, respectively—than Americans who are religiously unaffiliated. The numbers often get skewed, says Stanton, because most studies fail to take into account the level of religious commitment and practice among those who identify themselves as Christians.

Detroit Free Press (includes video): Rebecca Cardone, 21, who grew up Methodist in Texas, is president of the student body at California Lutheran University. But don’t call her Protestant or even Christian. Cardone is one of the new “Nones” — atheists, agnostics and folks like her who believe “nothing in particular.”

CBS: The number of Americans who do not identify with any religion continues to grow at a fast pace. One-fifth of the U.S. public – and a third of adults under 30 – are religiously unaffiliated today, the highest percentages ever in Pew Research Center polling.

Telegraph: Almost nine out of 10 Scottish households take more from the public purse than they contribute in taxes thanks to a “rotten system” of state patronage, the Tory party conference will hear on Monday.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: According to one of the latest Statistics Canada documents, “Portraits of Families and Living Arrangements in Canada: Families, households and marital status, 2011 Census of Population,” Canadian households have undergone substantial change since the last Census in 2006.

AP: U.S. births fell for the fourth year in a row, the government reported Wednesday, with experts calling it more proof that the weak economy has continued to dampen enthusiasm for having children.

Telegraph: The world needs to take urgent action to cope with the impact of a rapidly ageing population, according to a new report, which forecast that the number of people older than 60 would surpass one billion within a decade.

LifeSiteNews: When it comes to major life decisions, who in his right mind wouldn’t choose what sounded like more fun and less work? This, according to one observer, is the rationale behind a new trend in Canada: childlessness.

AP: Japan is the only country with 30 percent of its population over 60, but by 2050 more than 60 other countries, from China to Canada to Albania, will be in the same boat.

American Lawyer: According to a new survey conducted by legal search consultant Major, Lindsey & Africa and Am Law Daily affiliate ALM Legal Intelligence, partners at Am Law 200, NLJ 350, and American Lawyer Global 100 firms saw their annual compensation rise, on average, 6.4 percent to $681,000 over the past two years. The jump was apparently driven, at least in part, by an uptick in the average rate those partners are billing, from $555 per hour in 2010 to $585 today.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: Even skeptics of the demographic dividend have pointed to the success of the Asian Tigers as the exception to the global rule (there has been no such economic boom in the rest of the developing world despite falling fertility). Yet as a new Bank of Korea report confirms, the Aging Tigers, already eking out the last of the dividend, must now brace for the petering out of their workforce . . .

LifeSiteNews: Tanzania has only about 120 people per square mile, but the population controllers talk endlessly about overpopulation in the country, claiming that more people means more poverty.

Center for AZ Policy: On Friday, the Arizona Department of Health Services released their annual statistical report on abortions in Arizona. Initial media reports claimed a 25% increase in abortions in 2011 compared to 2010. As the DHS report indicates, however, abortion providers were not required to report abortion numbers until August of 2010. Consequently, any reports prior to August 2010 are unreliable. “You’re comparing apples to oranges if you look at 2010 to 2011,” said Cathi Herrod, president of Center for Arizona Policy.

NY Daily News: A new initiative in India could jail families who force women to abort a female fetus. Current laws prohibit sex selection, but they are widely ignored.

AZ Daily Sun: A new report shows a sharp increase in the number of Arizona women having abortions last year. Figures from the Department of Health Services put total abortions for Arizona women at 13,606. That is a 25 percent jump from 2010.

The Age: Sydney’s Catholic Archbishop has questioned whether the gender imbalance caused by the selective abortion of female foetuses could hinder the rise to affluence of China and India.

NCPA Policy Digest: From 1990 to 2010 the share of expenditures on housing — including principal, mortgage interest, taxes, maintenance and insurance — for these age groups increased about 25 percent.

Wayne Bowen at SEMissourian.com: While most of the growth in Islam occurs through natural increase, the addition of Muslim children to the faith, an accelerating percentage of Christianity’s growth is happening in nations where the Gospel of Jesus Christ faces persecution or outright bans

Texas Tribune: Certain characteristics set the Laredo Independent School District apart from most districts in the state. Its western boundary aligns directly with the Mexican border. Nearly all its students are poor, and nearly all are Hispanic. Most rely on the school to provide two meals a day. On the first day of school this week, some showed up without shoes or without parents accompanying them . . . By 2050, the number of Texas public school students is expected to swell to nine million from roughly five million now, and nearly two-thirds will be Hispanic, according to Steve Murdock, a demographer and director of Rice University’s Hobby Center for the Study of Texas. The overall percentage of white students will drop by half to about 15 percent . . .

AP: One way to think about this year’s election is as a contest between the impact of a sour economy (advantage Romney) and the power of the nation’s shifting demographics (advantage Obama).

Washington Post (see chart): While about half of American voters identify themselves as as antiabortion, a full 75 percent thought abortion should be legal in cases of rape or incest, according to a 2011 Gallup poll. Only 20 percent of Americans believed abortion should be illegal in all situations, that poll showed

Ramesh Ponnuru at National Review: Gender doesn’t explain abortion views, and abortion policy doesn’t explain Republicans’ gender gap.

Bloomberg: . . . Americans have had fewer babies each year since the 2008 financial meltdown, with births falling to a 12-year low in 2011, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. The low birth rate and reduced immigration resulted in the smallest gain in population since World War II, which may hurt spending on everything from Huggies diapers to pregnancy kits, child care and education.

George Weigel at EPPC: Despite some hiccups caused by the sorry state of the world economy, China is still The Future for many global analysts. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times has even suggested that Americans have a lot to learn politically from the economic successes of Chinese authoritarianism. That China is the rising world power seems taken for granted in many elite foreign policy circles. I’m not buying. I didn’t buy “Japan is Number One” when that was the mantra two decades ago, because Japan had severe demographic problems-as in, very few children; its lack of the most basic form of people power in the most elementary form, I thought, would soon become evident in economic weakness (as it has). China also has serious demographic problems. Thanks to a brutally enforced one-child policy

Newsletter.co.uk: However, although the number of abortions in Northern Ireland – less than 100 a year – is miniscule by comparison to the rest of the UK, concerns have been raised that some doctors may be getting around the strict ban on abortions in all cases other than those where the mother’s life is in immediate danger. Figures released in the House of Lords to the Crossbench peer Lord Alton show that in 43 years there have been just 143 abortions in England and Wales to save the mother’s life.

Fox News: As previous studies have suggested, the new research indicates that cohabitation may provide many of the benefits of marriagewithout some potential burdens, such as the mixing of financial assets.

Yahoo News: “If we go on like that, this place will fold up, because there’ll be no original citizens left to form the majority, and we cannot have new citizens, new PRs to settle our social ethos, our social spirit, our social norms,” he said, noting that Chinese reproduction rate is now at 1.08, Indians at 1.09 and Malays at 1.64.

NY Times: Zoey Kotzambasis, vice president of the College Republicans at the University of Arizona, considers herself a conservative. But she supports both same-sex marriage and abortion rights. Those are not just her opinions. “A lot of the College Republicans I know share the same liberal-to-moderate social views,” she added. “And I think that’s changing the face of the party.”

Turtle Bay and Beyond: Abortion is free in Cuba and it’s estimated that half of the children conceived on that island nation are killed before birth . . . With grown children leaving for the U.S. to find work, Cuba’s elderly increasingly depend on government support.

USA Today: The number of births overall to cohabiting women increased from 14% of all births in 2002 to 23% in 2006-10, according to the first federal report on intended and unintended births since 1990. Data released today by the National Center for Health Statistics show that more than three-quarters of all births to married women were intended, compared with about half of births to cohabiting women and a third of births to women who are unmarried and not cohabiting.

Steve Mosher at LifeSiteNews: Social security is about to go belly up, financially speaking. And at the head of this crisis is a demographic disproportion: there are simply too few young people coming into the workforce to support the increasing numbers of elderly baby boomers who are retiring.

LifeNews: Dr Jackie Sheehan, senior fellow at the China Policy Institute and associate professor at the School of Contemporary Chinese Studies at the University of Nottingham in England appears to have the answer. In a new article she’s written in the South China Morning Post, Sheehan says “powerful financial and personal incentives” exist for local officials to ensure “forced abortions and sterilizations continue on mainland despite calls to reform family planning laws.

LifeSiteNews: On July 11, the Lancet published the long-awaited 2010 euthanasia statistics based on a meta-analysis by a group of researchers.

WorldNetDaily: According the Cuban government statistics, 60.2 percent of all pregnancies on the island end in abortion. This is the highest number of any nation in the Western Hemisphere. Other attempts at an empirical analysis of Cuban abortion show 130,000 live births with just less than 85,000 abortions in a typical year

NY Times: Pan Chunyan was grabbed from her grocery store when she was almost eight months pregnant with her third child. Men working for a local official locked her up with two other women, and four days later brought her to a hospital and forced her to put her thumbprint on a document saying she had agreed to an abortion. A nurse injected her with a drug.

NCPA Policy Digest: With regard to wealth insecurity, Rank finds that workers between the ages of 25 and 60 experience vast changes in income over time, and that this exposes them to a wide variety of economic conditions . . . By age 60, nearly 77 percent of Americans will have lived in a household earning more than $100,000 for at least one year.

Rod Dreher at Real Clear Religion: What If Rachel Held Evans Is Wrong?
The Putnam-Campbell data suggest the real battle will not be over whether or not churches are going to embrace gay marriage. As I said, the churches that do aren’t benefiting from it, overall. The question is going to be whether or not young people remain Christian in any sense connected to the Great Tradition. Homosexuality is a clear, bright line.

C-Fam: Eberstadt and Shah point out that in terms of relative fertility decline, “the estimated population-weighted average for Muslim-majority areas as a whole was -41 percent over these three decades.” They show that “22 Muslim-majority countries and territories were estimated to have undergone fertility declines of 50 percent or more during those three decades–ten of them by 60 percent or more. For both Iran and the Maldives, the declines in total fertility rates over those 30 years were estimated to exceed 70 percent.”

Deseret News: Our take: The religion of Islam is growing faster than any other religion in San Diego, according to a new census. Currently there are 21,994 Muslims in that area, which makes it the seventh-largest religion in the U.S. Much of the growth is attributed to the immigration of Somali, Iraqi, Afghani and Bosnian refugees as well as to conversions within the U.S. and births.

MN Daily: John Capistrant, president of the anti-abortion student group Students for Human Life, said the decrease in abortion rates is related to the anti-abortion resources made available through pregnancy crisis centers and life care centers. “By making it known that there are other options out there, it is making women seek those options first before terminating their pregnancies,” Capistrant said.

LifeNews: “The UK Family Planning summit has concluded and the total financial commitment by attending countries and foundations amounts to $4.6 billion, which exceeds the $4 billion goal,” she explained.

CNSNews: A record of 8,733,461 workers took federal disability insurance payments in June 2012, according to the Social Security Administration. That was up from 8,707,185 in May.