Simon Rabinovitch

Chinese doctors have performed more than 330m abortions since the government implemented a controversial family planning policy 40 years ago, according to official data from the health ministry.
China’s one-child policy has been the subject of a heated debate about its economic consequences as the population ages. Forced abortions and sterilisations have also been criticised by human rights campaigners such as Chen Guangcheng, the blind legal activist who sought refuge at the US embassy in Beijing last year.
China first introduced measures to limit the size of the population in 1971, encouraging couples to have fewer children. The one-child rule, with exceptions for ethnic minorities and some rural families, was implemented at the end of the decade.
Since 1971, doctors have performed 336m abortions and 196m sterilisations, the data reveal. They have also inserted 403m intrauterine devices, a normal birth control procedure in the west but one that local officials often force on women in China.

Dhruv Mehrotra The outlier cases include custom summonses that sought records from a youth soccer league in Texas; surveillance video from a major abortion provider in Illinois; student records from an elementary school in Georgia; health records from a major state university’s student health services; data from three boards of elections or election departments; and … Continue reading Taxpayer Supported ICE data mining →

Ann Althouse A key I use to understanding puzzles like this is: People do what they want to do. What have they done? Begin with the hypothesis that what they did is what they wanted to do. If they postured that they wanted to do something else, regard that as a con. Work from there. … Continue reading Civics: Andrew Yang abortion commentary on political rhetoric vs actions →

Collin Anderson: Roughly a decade before his death in 1996, tech titan David Packard issued a controversial directive to his children. Skyrocketing birth rates, the Hewlett-Packard cofounder wrote, could one day cause “utter chaos for humanity.” As a result, Packard asserted, his multibillion-dollar foundation must hold one priority above all others: population control. Packard—a Republican who … Continue reading The Packard Foundation, declining live births and the abortion pill →

Patrick Hauf: The NEA is the largest teachers’ union in the U.S. with more than 3 million members. It collected nearly $400 million from American educators in 2018, according to federal labor filings. The union is also one of the most politically active in the country, spending $70 million on politics and lobbying in 2017 … Continue reading NEA passes resolution defending the ‘fundamental right to abortion’ →

Carly Cassella : While no country has a perfectly even sex ratio, normally researchers would expect roughly 105 male births to every 100 female births. Compiling data from over 200 nations – including 10,835 observations, and 16,602 years of information – the authors noticed a shocking number of countries have strayed from this mark. “The … Continue reading There Are 23 Million ‘Missing’ Girls in The World Due to Sex-Selective Abortions →

Lemor Abrams: This week, Rocklin High School students are using social media to organize a pro-life walkout using the hashtag #life. “To honor all the lives of aborted babies pretty much. All the millions of aborted babies every year,” said organizer Brandon Gillespie. He says his history teacher inspired the idea. As thousands of students … Continue reading Student Planning Abortion Protest After School Shooting Walkout →

Janet Adamy and Anthony DeBarros: Some demographers cite an outside chance the population could shrink for the first time on record. Population growth is an important influence on the size of the labor market and a country’s fiscal and economic strength. Yet after births peaked in 2007, they never rebounded from the nearly two-year recession … Continue reading K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Covid-19 pandemic compounds years of birth-rate decline, puts America’s demographic health at risk →

Axios: As the U.S. fertility rate falls to a 35-year-low, new technologies promise to radically change how we have babies. Why it matters: The demand for assisted reproductive technology like IVF is likely to grow as people delay the decision to have children. But newer advances in gene editing and diagnostic testing could open the … Continue reading K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: the U.S. fertility rate falls to a 35-year-low →

Ronald Bailey: The U.S. total fertility rate has dropped to below 1.73 births per woman, according to a new report from the National Center for Health Statistics. This record low edges out the previous U.S. fertility nadir of 1.74 births per woman back in 1976. U.S. rates appear to be following the downward trend seen … Continue reading U.S. Fertility Reaches All-Time Low as People Choose Things Other Than Children →

Simon Rabinovitch: Some, er, original thinking about how China might boost its fertility rate: Peking U prof suggests that any family which has five children should be given one guaranteed entry to the prestigious university, to recognize their contribution to the country. US and global abortion data.

Andre Tartar, Hannah Recht, and Yue Qiu: While the global average fertility rate was still above the rate of replacement—technically 2.1 children per woman—in 2017, about half of all countries had already fallen below it, up from 1 in 20 just half a century ago. For places such as the U.S. and parts of Western … Continue reading The global fertility crash →

Riley Vetterkind: That comes as the fertility rate for women in their childbearing years has fallen to the lowest level since 2002, prompting concerns Wisconsin within the next decade could see an unprecedented natural population decline, in which the number of deaths in the state exceeds births. It’s unclear whether a natural population decline is … Continue reading K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: More deaths than births in Wisconsin? It could happen within 15 years →

Sheila Liming: I live in a land of austerity, and I’m not just talking about the scenery. When most people think about North Dakota — if, indeed, they ever do — they probably imagine bare, ice-crusted prairies swept clean by wind. They see the clichés, in other words, not the reality — the towns that … Continue reading My University Is Dying; Soon Yours Will Be, Too →

Chris Baynes: An investigation into suspected sex-selective abortions has been launched by magistrates in a district of northern India after government data showed none of the 216 children born across 132 villages over three months were girls. Authorities in Uttarkashi, Uttarakhand state, said the official birth rate was “alarming” and pointed towards widespread female foeticide, … Continue reading Choose Life: ‘No girls born’ for past three months in area of India covering 132 villages →

Jacqueline Howard: The birth rate rose 1% among women aged 35 to 39 and 2% among women 40 to 44. The rate for women 45 to 49, which also includes births to women 50 and older, did not change from 2017 to 2018. Overall, the provisional number of births in 2018 for the United States … Continue reading K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: America just had its lowest number of births in 32 years, report finds →

Kenneth Johnson: Nor do new data just released show any evidence of an upturn in births. National Center for Health Statistics data for 2015 show the lowest general fertility rate on record and only 3,978,000 births last year. There were 338,000 (8 percent) fewer births in 2015 than in 2007, just before the Recession began … Continue reading U.S. Births Remain Low as the Great Recession Wanes: More Than Three Million Fewer Births and Still Counting →

Natalie Stechyson It’s something her own children won’t experience. Lancastle’s older brother and sister don’t have children and her husband is an only child. So Nicholas, 9, and Charlie, 7, don’t have any cousins at all — a growing trend as the decreasing fertility rate causes extended families to narrow over time, sociologists and demographers say. Worldwide, families … Continue reading Cousins are disappearing. Is this reshaping the experience of childhood? →

Julia Love: On Friday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and its Pennsylvania chapter argued in a court filing that the investigative technique used in the case, known as a keyword search warrant, is dangerously broad and threatens to infringe on the privacy rights of innocent people. “Keyword search warrants … Continue reading Civics: Keyword Search Warrants →

Dave Cieslewicz Now comes a predictable lawsuit from a liberal group that was filed recently directly with the state Supreme Court, skipping the usual process that starts with lower courts. It’s predictable because now that the Court has a 4-3 liberal majority every liberal cause in the state that can afford a lawyer will be … Continue reading Why is denying less well-off families the same educational options that more well-to-do families have progressive? →

Luke Andrews: Dr Melissa Kearney, an economic professor at the University of Maryland, previously told DailyMail.com: ‘There has been a greater emphasis on spending time building careers. Adults are changing their attitudes towards having kids. ‘They are choosing to spend money and time in different ways… [that] are coming into conflict with parenting.’ There are … Continue reading America’s fertility crash laid bare: Interactive map shows how birth rate has plummeted since 2007 – falling by up to a THIRD in some states →

Jessica Grose: The number of school-age children in America is declining. At least one reason is the fallingbirthrate after the Great Recession. And declining university enrollment based on a lower school-age population — which has been described as a “demographic cliff” — is something that some colleges are already grappling with. K-12 public school systems … Continue reading Notes on Declining Student Population →

Amy Kazmin and Chris Giles: “It’s a demographic crisis — we are going to lose a lot of people in the future,” Testa said, adding that the forecast assumed a recovery in fertility rates to 1.5 children per woman. “It’s a pretty rapid change.” If the fertility rate failed to rebound and instead stayed at … Continue reading Italian births drop to lowest level since country’s unification →

Wall Street Journal: The parental revolt even spread to Minnesota despite opposition from teachers union. Denise Specht, the president of the teacher’s union Education Minnesota, claimed in September that its “political program has been successful between 80 and 90 percent of the time when our locals make endorsements in school board races and carry out an … Continue reading Challenges to union control of local school governance were often successful. →

Joanne Jacobs: Naomi Schaefer Riley hears an “anti-adoption drumbeat” from the media. “In the wake of the Dobbs decision, the Left wants to make sure that no one thinks adoption is preferable to abortion,” she writes. In fiscal 2021, 114,000 children in foster care were waiting for adoptive parents, according to federal data. Only 54,200 … Continue reading “Anti-adoption drumbeat” leaves kids in foster care →

Jeffrey Carter: First, some background. Here is some data from Illinois that is also repeated across the country, I looked to two sources. Illinois Policy and Wirepoints. Illinois Policy tweeted out this video you should watch. Wirepoints compiled data on Illinois education. Here is an example. Decatur is mostly Black. New Trier’s administration is woke … Continue reading K-12 Governance Climate: But, the first strike in the fight happened in the northern suburbs of Chicago. →

Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox: We are entering an unanticipated reality—an era of slow population growth and, increasingly, demographic decline that will shape our future in profound and unpredictable ways. Globally, last year’s total population growth was the smallest in a half-century, and by 2050, some 61 countries are expected to see population declines while the world’s … Continue reading We need to consider ways to reverse or at least slow rapid depopulation →

Raquel Maria Dillon: Concerns over the role of technology in such prosecutions have ratcheted up in recent days, especially after it was revealed that Facebook had handed over private messages between a young woman and her mother in Nebraska to local law enforcement agencies that were investigating the death of a fetus. In-q-tel: the CIA … Continue reading Google workers publicize concerns over search activity history (!) →

Rachel K. Jones, Jesse Philbin, Marielle Kirstein, Elizabeth Nash, Kimberley Lufkin: According to new findings from Guttmacher’s latest Abortion Provider Census—the most comprehensive data collection effort on abortion provision in the United States—there were 8% more abortions in 2020 than in 2017. Pam Belluck: The uptick began in 2017, and as of 2020, one in … Continue reading Speaking of declining Madison K-12 enrollment & Eugenics →

David Blaska: If you doubt that the Woke Wobblies have taken over Madison’s public schools, we submit the following: School board president Ali Muldrow and immediate past member Ananda Mirilli are accusing Ismael Ozanne, a black man, of racism most foul. They want him to resign (!!!) because police arrested Freedom Inc. spokesperson Jessica Williams … Continue reading Race and the Taxpayer Funded Madison School District →

Michael Bender: Democrat Jennifer Loughran spent the pandemic’s early days sewing face masks for neighbors. Last month, as a newly elected school-board member, she voted to lift the district’s mask mandate. That came four months after she voted for the state’s Republican candidate for governor. After a monthslong political identity crisis, Ms. Loughran decided her opposition … Continue reading ‘So disillusioned”: Mandates, Parents, Students and K-12 Governance →

Tanya Lewis: Arnstein Aassve, a professor of social and political sciences at Bocconi University in Italy, and his colleagues looked at birth rates in 22 high-income countries, including the U.S., from 2016 through the beginning of 2021. They found that seven of these countries had statistically significant declines in birth rates in the final months … Continue reading The Pandemic Caused a Baby Bust, Not a Boom →

Reuters: China scrapped its decades-old one-child policy in 2016, replacing it with a two-child limit to try to avoid the economic risks from a rapidly aging population, but the high cost of urban living has deterred couples from having more children. The 2021 rate of 7.52 births per 1,000 people was the lowest since 1949, … Continue reading China’s birth rate drops to record low in 2021 →

Rhythma Kaul and Anonna Dutt: India’s Total Fertility Rate (TFR), or the average number of children a woman gives birth to in her lifetime, has declined from 2.2 to 2 while the Contraceptive Prevalence Rate (CPR) has increased from 54% to 67%, according data from the National Family Health Survey-5. The union health ministry released data for … Continue reading India’s fertility rate drops below 2.1, contraceptive prevalence up: NFHS →

Joel Kotkin: Families, and the lack of them, are emerging as one of the great political dividing lines in America, and much of the high-income world. The familial ideal was once embraced by all political factions, except on the extremes, but that is no longer the case. This is among the biggest lessons from the … Continue reading Rising numbers of single people and plummeting birth rates are bad news for civilisation. →

Joel Kotkin: For millennia the family has stood as the central institution of society—often changing, but always essential. But across the world, from China to North America, and particularly in Europe, family ties are weakening, with the potential to undermine one of the last few precious bits of privacy and intimacy. Margaret Mead once said, “no … Continue reading K-12 Tax & Spending climate: “the fading family” →

Sabrina Tavernise: How the declining birthrate could profoundly shape the nation’s future. michael barbaroFrom The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. [music]A few days ago, the U.S. government revealed that the country’s population is growing at the slowest rate in nearly a century. Today, Astead Herndon spoke with our colleague Sabrina … Continue reading The birthrate in the United States has fallen by about 19 percent since its recent peak in 2007 →

Ann Althouse: There was some concern expressed yesterday over the “remarkable slackening” in population growth seen in the 2020 census. What will it do to the economy going forward if Americans don’t maintain the long human tradition of robust reproduction? I was inclined to say, don’t worry about it, less population growth is good for … Continue reading “It’s probably true that these children of Americans who are not getting born would probably be dull slackers compared to the plucky, effervescent immigrants.” →

Tara Bahrampour, Harry Stevens and Adrian Blanco: The birthrate has also dropped, and life expectancy has dipped in the past couple of years — a reversal that has been driven by factors such as drug overdoses, obesity, suicide and liver disease and that sharply accelerated last year during the pandemic. The extent to which the … Continue reading K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: 2020 Census shows U.S. population grew at slowest pace since the 1930s →

Kelly Meyerhofer: Yet many of the branch campuses have fewer students enrolled than at any point during the past 45 years. What effect would closing one or more of them have on access to higher education? The Wisconsin State Journal turned to UW-Madison higher education professor Nicholas Hillman, who leads the university’s Student Success Through … Continue reading Small UW campuses provide access to education. What would happen if they disappeared? →

Kirsten Grind, Sam Schechner, Robert McMillan and John West: More than 100 interviews and the Journal’s own testing of Google’s search results reveal: Google made algorithmic changes to its search results that favor big businesses over smaller ones, and in at least one case made changes on behalf of a major advertiser, eBay Inc., contrary … Continue reading How Google Interferes With Its Search Algorithms and Changes Your Results →

Possible de-regulation of Wisconsin charter school authorizations has lead to a bit of rhetoric on the state of Madison’s schools, their ability to compete and whether the District’s long term, disastrous reading results are being addressed. We begin with Chris Rickert: Madison school officials not eager to cede control of ‘progress’: Still, Department of Public … Continue reading Commentary on Madison’s long term Reading “Tax” & Monolithic K-12 System →

Aleks Eror:

It’s not exactly news that China is setting itself up as a new global superpower, is it? While Western civilization chokes on its own gluttony like a latter-day Marlon Brando, China continues to buy up American debt and lock away the world’s natural resources. But now, not content to simply laugh and make jerk-off signs as they pass us on the geopolitical highway, they’ve also developed a state-endorsed genetic-engineering project.
At BGI Shenzhen, scientists have collected DNA samples from 2,000 of the world’s smartest people and are sequencing their entire genomes in an attempt to identify the alleles which determine human intelligence. Apparently they’re not far from finding them, and when they do, embryo screening will allow parents to pick their brightest zygote and potentially bump up every generation’s intelligence by five to 15 IQ points. Within a couple of generations, competing with the Chinese on an intellectual level will be like challenging Lena Dunham to a getting-naked-on-TV contest.
Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist and lecturer at NYU, is one of the 2,000 braniacs who contributed their DNA. I spoke to him about what this creepy-ass program might mean for the future of Chinese kids.

Related: New data reveal scale of China abortions and Eugenics.
Many links here.
Technology Review:

In its scientific work, BGI often acts as the enabler of other people’s ideas. That is the case in a major project conceived by Steve Hsu, vice president for research at Michigan State University, to search for genes that influence intelligence. Under the guidance of Zhao Bowen, BGI is now sequencing the DNA of more than 2,000 people–mostly Americans–who have IQ scores of at least 160, or four standard deviations above the mean.
The DNA comes primarily from a collection of blood ­samples amassed by Robert Plomin, a psychologist at King’s College, London. The plan, to compare the genomes of geniuses and people of ordinary intelligence, is scientifically risky (it’s likely that thousands of genes are involved) and somewhat controversial. For those reasons it would be very hard to find the $15 or $20 million needed to carry out the project in the West. “Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t,” Plomin says. “But BGI is doing it basically for free.”
From Plomin’s perspective, BGI is so large that it appears to have more DNA sequencing capacity than it knows what to do with. It has “all those machines and people that have to be fed” with projects, he says. The IQ study isn’t the only mega-project under way. With a U.S. nonprofit, Autism Speaks, BGI is being paid to sequence the DNA of up to 10,000 people from families with autistic children. For researchers in Denmark, BGI is decoding the genomes of 3,000 obese people and 3,000 lean ones.