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Search Results for: Abortion

The state recorded eight deaths among infants who survived abortion attempts during Tim Walz’s tenure as governor.

Alex Demas Kirk and Solomon’s claims are correct. Minnesota Department of Health documents show that eight infants were born alive during abortion procedures between 2019 and 2022, and, in 2023, Walz signed legislation that repealed most of a statute designed to protect infants born alive after an abortion attempt. Born-alive infants in Minnesota. Minnesota state […]

Chicago teachers’ $50B demands include pay hikes, abortions, migrant accommodation

Michael Dorgan: The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) is negotiating a new contract with the public schools system and is understood to be calling for an extra $50 billion to pay for wage hikes as well as other demands such as fully paid abortions for its members, new migrant services and facilities and a host of LGBT-related requirements and […]

Civics: The First Amendment, Lawfare and abortion protests

Lisa Carr: Eva Edl, Eva Zastrow, James Zastrow, and Paul Place had charges brought against them for being part of a peaceful protest on March 5, 2021. They gathered on the second floor of an office building in the hallway outside the Carafem Health Center Clinic. The group prayed, sang hymns, and urged women showing up to […]

Abortion, life and politics

Harm Venhuizen “I continue to believe that having ‘we the people’ decide the profound moral issue of abortion is the only way to find a reasonable consensus that most people will accept,” Johnson said in a statement Wednesday. “One of the benefits of a one-time, single-issue referendum would be the education and discussion that would […]

Notes on abortion and human rights

Jim Nelles: Interestingly, Ginsburg had spoken about the case she wished had been heard by the Supreme Court, Struck v. Secretary of Defense. Ginsburg represented Captain Susan Struck, who became pregnant while serving in the Air Force in Viet Nam. The Air Force told her to either terminate the pregnancy or leave the Air Force. Struck […]

Pro life vs Pro Abortion Speech

Emily Fowler: With the anniversary of the overturn of Roe v. Wade just around the corner, Campus Reform reached out to student leaders of pro-life organizations across the country to see what the campus climate has been like since the landmark Dobbs decision was handed down.  Three out of five students Campus Reform interviewed stated that they have experienced more vandalism and backlash since Roe was overturned […]

Considering all abortion costs

Ross Douthat “You can’t insist that the immediate economic benefits of ending a pregnancy should be counted in Roe v. Wade’s favor, but any of the larger negative shifts in mating and marriage…””… and child rearing associated with abortion can’t be considered as part of the debate…. [Consider a] world clearly shadowed by the effects […]

Being adopted has shaped their views on abortion — in different ways

Olivia McCormack Ryan Bomberger comes from a family of 15. He was adopted out of the foster-care system — along with 9 of his 12 siblings. Bomberger is staunchly antiabortion, in part because of the circumstances around his own conception, he said. “I am 100 percent antiabortion, 100 percent pro-life,” said Bomberger, a 51-year-old living […]

UNC Chapel Hill Student Gov’t Cuts Off Funding & Contracting to Anyone Who “Advocates” for Limits on Abortion

Eugene Volokh: The student government president’s executive orderprovides, among other things, That it shall be prohibited for the Undergraduate Student Government Executive Branch to contract or expend funds to any individual, business, or organization which actively advocates to further limit by law access to reproductive healthcare, including, though not limited to, contraception and induced abortions. This […]

Abortion, Adoption and Parenthood

Janice Goldwater: In a 2016 analysis as part of the five-year Turnaway Study… UCSF researchers… found that one week after being denied an abortion due to a late-term pregnancy just 14 percent of 171 study participants reported plans to place the baby for adoption or considered it as an option. Only nine percent of those […]

Should State Universities Have Official Positions on Whether Constitution Should Be Read as Protecting Abortion?

Eugene Volokh: I don’t think that a public university’s “mission and values” should be to promote a reading of the Constitution as securing abortion rights, or as not securing abortion rights, as opposed to promoting research on this and related questions. And while of course a public university that runs hospitals should generally perform legal […]

Civics: Andrew Yang abortion commentary on political rhetoric vs actions

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. […]

The Packard Foundation, declining live births and the abortion pill

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 […]

Selective abortion in India could lead to 6.8m fewer girls being born by 2030

Amrit Dhillon: An estimated 6.8 million fewer female births will be recorded across India by 2030 because of the persistent use of selective abortions, researchers estimate. Academics from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia projected the sex ratio at birth in 29 Indian states and union territories, covering almost the entire population, taking […]

NEA passes resolution defending the ‘fundamental right to abortion’

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 […]

Appeal court overturns forced abortion ruling

Harriett Sherwood: On Friday, the court of protection in London decided an abortion was in the best interests of the woman, who is in her 20s, and is 22 weeks pregnant. She has the mental capacity of a six- to nine-year-old child. Justice Nathalie Lieven, who made the original ruling, described it as “heartbreaking”, saying: […]

Civics: Does anything link the eugenics of the past to abortion today?

Ross Douthat: The Thomas argument, common inside the pro-life movement but startling to many, is that the present “reproductive rights” regime may effectively extend older eugenic efforts to reduce populations deemed unfit. His dissent cited the eugenic inclinations of progressive icons like Margaret Sanger, while pointing out that today’s abortion rates are highest among populations […]

There Are 23 Million ‘Missing’ Girls in The World Due to Sex-Selective Abortions

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 […]

Choose Life: the ongoing battle – China’s Proposed ‘No Child Tax’ Stirs Controversy: “First Forced Abortions, Now Pressured Into Pregnancy”

What’s on Weibo: A recent article, in which two Chinese academics propose the implementation of some sort of ‘tax’ for people under 40 who have no second child, has sparked outrage on social media. “The same woman who had to undergo a forced abortion before, is now pressured to get pregnant,” some say. A controversial […]

Student Planning Abortion Protest After School Shooting Walkout

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 […]

Has Iceland Eliminated Down Syndrome Through Abortion?

Snopes: The report does not suggest that, however. It suggests that nearly 100 percent of the 80 to 85 percent of people who take the test choose to abort their pregnancy. There are similar termination rates after fetal diagnoses of Down syndrome in other European countries. In Denmark, for example, the rate is about 98 […]

Chinese Father of Four Forced to Undergo Vasectomy: Case sheds light on forced sterilization, abortion quotas, and other dubious family planning practices.

Wang Lianzhang: After spending more than 10 years away from his hometown of Luokan, in the southwestern province of Yunnan, a 42-year-old man was forced by local authorities to undergo a vasectomy upon returning for the lunar new year holiday. He was taken away by family planning officials on Feb. 8, and the operation was […]

New data reveal scale of China abortions

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.

Reports surface that teens are taking cow drugs for abortions

Erin Richards:

Veterinary and medical professionals in Wisconsin said Friday that they have been warned about a potentially alarming practice among the state’s rural youth: teenage girls ingesting livestock drugs to cheaply and discreetly end their unwanted pregnancies.
So far, the professionals in animal and human health and the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction are treating the reports of girls inducing their own abortions with prostaglandins – drugs commonly used by cow breeders to regulate animals’ heat cycles – as rumors, because no cases have been officially confirmed by the Wisconsin Department of Health Services.
But Anna Anderson, the executive director of Care Net Pregnancy Center of Green County in Monroe, maintains that she has identified at least 10 girls ages 14 to 18 in a three-county area who admitted to taking some form of cow abortifacient in the past year.
Anderson said the girls told her they took it because they found it to be a cheap and easy way to end their pregnancies without their parents finding out.
At the American Veterinary Medical Association, Assistant Director Kimberly May said Friday that her organization first heard the rumor about the teenagers in mid-February from the Wisconsin Veterinary Medical Association. Since then, the American Animal Hospital Association has also posted an advisory about the issue on its Web site.
Injected properly in livestock, prostaglandins shorten a heat cycle so a female animal can be bred again, May said.

Japan’s declining births on track to fall below 700,000

Kenjiro Takahashi: The number of births of Japanese children in the first half of 2024 has continued its alarming downward trend, with only 329,998 babies born between January and June. If this pace continues, the country’s annual birth count will fall below 700,000 for the first time since 1947, when comparative statistics became available.  On […]

“We thought the union would focus on things that matter, like wages and benefits”

Michael Alcorn & Leslie Stratford: Instead, union representatives negotiated over things like “pronoun pins,” which the company already provides. They demanded that Trader Joe’s cover abortion and “gender-affirming care.” The company’s response: The health plan already covers that. Either the union negotiators were embarrassingly uninformed, or they were playing a political game with workers as […]

Civics: She Was Arrested for Praying in Her Head

Madeleine Kearns: On October 4, Emma, who asked not to be named, got a letter from the Scottish government. Addressed “Dear Resident,” its purpose was to alert her that her home, due to its proximity to the hospital, is now in an abortion censorship zone.   This is due to the UK’s brand-new “Safe Access” law, which came […]

The Age of Depopulation

Nicholas Eberstadt: With birthrates plummeting, more and more societies are heading into an era of pervasive and indefinite depopulation, one that will eventually encompass the whole planet. What lies ahead is a world made up of shrinking and aging societies. Net mortality—when a society experiences more deaths than births—will likewise become the new norm. Driven […]

Civics: “Trump judges outperform other judges, with the very top rankings of judges predominantly filled by Trump judges”

Stephen J. Choi and Mitu Gulati: Donald J. Trump’s presidency broke the mold in many ways, including how to think about judicial appointments. Unlike other recent presidents, Trump was open about how “his” judges could be depended on to rule in particular ways on key issues important to voters he was courting (e.g., on issues such as […]

Civics: Harris Wants the Senate Filibuster Gone

Wall Street Journal: Kamala Harris is still keeping most of her agenda incognito, but she gave a strong hint about its direction on Tuesday when she blessed the Democratic plan to blow up the Senate’s filibuster rule. This would turn the Senate into the House for the purposes of passing legislation, which means a wide […]

Notes on the Birthrate

Bezos Washington Post To have children or not to have them? That is the question more and more Americans are asking themselves. Only 26 percent say having children is extremely or very important for a fulfilling life, according to a Pew Research Center survey, whereas 71 percent say the same about “having a job or career they […]

“A cute new approach to the fight for life”

Peachy Keenan: What if the best way to change her mind was not by focusing on votes, elections, candidates, the legality of a 6- or 8-week ban, or technicalities like viability? What if instead of “abortions are bad,” the argument was: “Babies are awesome!” Imagine connecting the clinical concept of “embryo” and “fetus” to “a little […]

The Missing Girls: How China’s One-Child Policy Tore Families Apart

Liyan Qi: Ricki Mudd was born in 1993 in China during the one-child policy era. She remembers her early childhood only in fragments, but has been told she had spent some of it hidden in a bag. At age 5, she was adopted from a Chinese orphanage, one of the more than 150,000 children China […]

56% of those without children would have some if they could go back.

Frank Newport and Joy Wilke: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that the U.S. general fertility rate reached an all-time low in 2011, at 63.2 births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44. The fertility rate has dropped 11% from 1990, when there were 70.9 births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44. The […]

Childless Cities

Emma Jacobs: —— Choose life!

Civics: Leaks from inside the Supreme Court target the Chief Justice in the Trump cases

Wall Street Journal: The story’s theme is that in three cases last term the Chief steered the Court to help Donald Trump: “How Roberts Shaped Trump’s Supreme Court Winning Streak.” It is slanted in the way readers have come to expect from the Times, minimizing the constitutional arguments in the cases and highlighting the political […]

Civics: Evaluating Judges

Jonathan Adler: A new paper by Stephen Choi and Mitu Gulati, “How Different Are the Trump Judges?” seeks to evaluate the quality of Trump’s judicial appointments as compared to their colleagues on the bench. It produces some interesting results. Here’s the abstract. Donald J. Trump’s presidency broke the mold in many ways, including how to think about […]

Making families cool again

Glenn Reynolds Last week the Democrats showed us the past and the future of population policy. Even as they cheered news that a Planned Parenthood mobile van would park right outside their national convention to choke off pregnancies with free abortions and vasectomies, nominee Kamala Harris announced a half-baked proposal to encourage childbearing via tax credits for new parents. The […]

The war on children

Don Surber:

only “31% of elementary school students in Chicago Public Schools were proficient in reading,”

Matt Lamb The Chicago Teachers Union president has a convenient excuse for low test scores in the public school system: The exams are “rooted in white supremacy.” “The way in which, you know, we think about learning and think about achievement is really and truly based on testing, which at best is junk science rooted in white supremacy,” Stacy Davis […]

“Milwaukee ranks relatively high in total revenue per student compared to other large districts nationally” – Madison is higher, yet

Sara R. Shaw, Robert Rauh, Jeff Schmidt, Jason Stein and Rob Henken: We can show that by looking at the overall operating funds available to the district from local, state, and federal sources. Using a metric developed for the Forum’s School DataTool, we found that MPS had operating spending in the 2022 school year of […]

China’s urban pets forecast to outnumber toddlers this year

Leo Lewis in Tokyo and Wang Xueqiao and Thomas Hale in Shanghai In the US, which is by far the world’s largest pet market, there are more pets than children of any age. The American Veterinary Medical Association estimates there were 84mn-89mn dogs and 60mn-62mn cats in 2020. Government data shows there were 73mn children […]

Academic journals are a lucrative scam – and we’re determined to change that

Arash Abizadeh If you’ve ever read an academic article, the chances are that you were unwittingly paying tribute to a vast profit-generating machine that exploits the free labour of researchers and siphons off public funds. The annual revenues of the “big five” commercial publishers – Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, and SAGE – […]

Recent birth counts point to rapidly shrinking school enrollment in Milwaukee

John Johnson: Many things affect a school (or district’s) enrollment, but the most important is simply how many children live there. In Milwaukee, recent birth trends point to a future of dwindling class sizes, beginning in elementary school and working their way up through the higher grades. Absent a spike in the birth rate or […]

“enrollment has declined by nearly 67% over the past 10 years”

Wispolitics: Oshkosh Chancellor Andrew Leavitt announced the university’s Fox Cities campus will close in June 2025 due to low enrollment — the sixth two-year campus in two years to either end in-person instruction or shut completely. Leavitt confirmed the news Thursday after Outagamie County Exec Tom Nelson blasted him and UW President Jay Rothman for […]

Many left-leaning, middle-class Americans speak of kids as though they are impositions, or means to an end.

Jay Caspian Kang A new book by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, “What Are Children For?,” is an engaging, literary investigation into why so many highly educated, financially comfortable women in the United States are ambivalent about having children, and how we should actually think about that decision. (I recently interviewed the authors on a podcast […]

Free speech and the academic paper mill

Kate Roberson: An academic journal has reversed course and rejected an article about abortion that it initially accepted, citing concerns about the author being a “white” “male,” according to an email from the editor obtained by The College Fix. The article “Abortion Restrictions are Good for Black Women” by philosopher Perry Hendricks initially was accepted for […]

Life during and after the coming Demographic Winter.

Glenn Reynolds: Over the past 50+ years, traditional ideas, like Butker’s, about marriage, child-rearing, and gender roles have been marginalized, in favor of those the put much less emphasis on, well, marriage, child-rearing, and traditional views about gender roles.  And now we’re facing a global baby bust, or as some are calling it, a “demographic winter” due […]

Urban school districts grapple with under-resourced schools, emotional closures in the face of plummeting enrollment

Sara Randazzo and Matt Barnum: Solis’s closure is an omen of what could be coming to more schools in Los Angeles and cities across the country. And it reflects a difficult-to-sustain dynamic: too many schools for too few students. As birthrates have dipped, families have moved elsewhere, and public school alternatives have grown, many urban […]

Which other colleges are at risk of shutting down?

STL: Birth rates have steadily declined since the Great Recession in 2008, a cohort that will start graduating high school next year. At the same time, tuition and operating costs have skyrocketed. And with rising doubts among Americans about the value of higher education, more campus closures are “inevitable and probably necessary,” McCarter said. Nationwide, […]

Civics: “judge-mandering” – America’s federal district courts may soon be harder to manipulate

The Economist: The strategy—call it “judge-mandering”, a cousin of electoral gerrymandering—has thwarted Mr Biden’s policies on immigration, student loans and abortion pills. Before that it frustrated Mr Trump’s efforts to bar transgender soldiers, divert emergency funds to build a border wall and keep out travellers from certain Muslim countries. Judge-mandering has two components: filing lawsuits in […]

Thirteen federal judges said Monday that they would no longer hire law clerks from Columbia College or Columbia Law School

Aaron Sibarium: Thirteen federal judges said Monday that they would no longer hire law clerks from Columbia College or Columbia Law School after the university allowed an encampment on its lawn to spiral into a destructive occupation of a campus building. The judges cited the “explosion of student disruptions” and the “virulent spread of antisemitism” […]

“Planned Parenthood seeking an original action ruling from the Supreme Court of Wisconsin (SCoW)”

WILL The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) has filed a response to a case brought by Planned Parenthood seeking an original action ruling from the Supreme Court of Wisconsin (SCoW) that would create a constitutional right to an abortion in Wisconsin. WILL believes ruling in favor of Planned Parenthood would embroil SCoW in the same mess of policy questions that Roe […]

Civics: Blue-collar workers have been abandoned by both the Democrats and the Republicans. Batya Ungar-Sargon explains why.

Batya Ungar-Sargon But what if I told you that the people in the political and media classes are the ones who are polarized—in fact, they are the onlyones who are so polarized? This is obvious to most Americans, even—perhaps especially—to those who have neighbors or friends or colleagues who vote differently than they do. Regular Americans […]

K-12 Tax & $pending Climate: 2028 and local politics

Russell Berman: The tragedy hardened Longo’s views on crime and abortion. “I could not vote for President Biden,” he said. Khanna sat quietly as Longo spoke. “One of the challenges we have as a country is we have a wrong stereotypical view of the Trump voter,” Khanna said to us after the conversation had moved […]

Politics and the taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI

Jill Underly: “Wisconsin, everything is on the line. Our democracy and our civil rights. Our children’s future. Our character as a nation.” ——- Media commentary. ——- The Wisconsin DPI and our long term, disastrous reading results. Much more on Jill Underly.

Students Aren’t the Obstacle to Open Debate at Harvard

Tarek Massed: Professors hear a great deal these days about how hard it is to get our students to listen to, much less to engage with, opinions they dislike. The problem, we are told, is that students are either “snowflakes” with fragile psyches or “authoritarians” who care more about their pet causes than about democratic […]

Cousins are disappearing. Is this reshaping the experience of childhood?

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 […]

Fewer and faster: Global fertility isn’t just declining, it’s collapsing

James Pethokoukis But there’s another kind of Peak Human, a moment whose occurrence and timing are far more foreseeable. If you’re a Millennial or a younger Gen Xer, you’ll probably see the start of a long-term decline in human population due to the global collapse in fertility. That’s something that’s never happened before with Homo […]

Civics: Keyword Search Warrants

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 […]

Japan’s 18-year-olds at record-low 1.06 million on falling births

Japan Times: The number of those that have reached Japan’s legal adult age fell by 60,000 from 2023 and accounted for 0.86% of Japan’s total population, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications said Sunday. The year 2005, when the new adults were born, had seen the country’s total fertility rate — the average number […]

Ivy League Presidents and the Collapse of Moral Reasoning

Bishop Robert Barron: Last week, the presidents of three Ivy League universities—Harvard, MIT, and Penn—appeared before Congress to address the issue of anti-Semitism on their campuses, in the wake of the conflict between Hamas and the state of Israel. In their formal statements as well as in the conversation with the congressional committee members, they acknowledged the […]

Civics: History and the Supreme Court

This article cites a claim that that opponents of abortion did not make historical arguments until the '80s. From Justice Rehnquist's 1973 dissent in Roe: "The fact that a majority of the States reflecting, after all the majority sentiment in those States, have had restrictions… — Rick Esenberg (@RickEsenberg) December 3, 2023

Christopher Hitchens and the collapse of journalism and critical thinking

Mark Judge: In a couple of weeks, publisher Twelve Books will release A Hitch in Time: Reflections Ready for Reconsideration, a collection of essays by the late journalist Christopher Hitchens . I secured an early copy of the book. Hitchens’s writing is still sparkling and insightful, even though he died in 2011. Hitchens is still so bracing because, […]

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: declining parenthood and the tax base

Michael Walsh: Social Security’s problems aren’t just its unrealistic economics, which posited starting from a hole and an ever-increasing work force paying taxes in order to support the generation ahead of it; the “trust fund” was always a polite fiction, which as you see is now being stealthily abandoned. But keeping Social Security solvent isn’t […]

Fertility

Robin Hanson: Re fertility decline, yes, as the main change in the last half century is the number of women who become moms, not the number of kids per mom, all we need is a larger fraction of women having kids. Yes, as that used to happen, it must still be feasible. Yes, a big […]

Academic Freedom and the Harvard Hedge Fund

Colleen Farabaugh: A conservative Harvard University professor described his fight against cancellation by his peers after he publicly came out against the Supreme Court’s redefining of marriage. Harvard School of Public Health Professor Tyler VanderWeele detailed the saga in a nine-page article titled “Moral Controversies and academic public health; notes on navigating and surviving academic freedom challenges.” […]

Why is denying less well-off families the same educational options that more well-to-do families have progressive?

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 […]

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

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 […]

The Fertility Crisis

Zvi Mowshowitz The world is slowly waking up to the fertility crisis. There is more acknowledgement of the problem, and there is more talk of potential practical solutions. I do not believe the topic is a realistic target for Balsa Policy Institute, but I will continue to keep an eye on the ball and issue […]

Embryo Selection

Diana Fleischman, Ives Parr, Jonathan Anomaly, and Laurent Tellier: This is where a new technology comes in: preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic disorders (PGT-P) or polygenic screening, which may inform which embryo parents choose and who is born. Because embryo choice is so consequential, polygenic screening—like other, new reproductive technologies before it—attracts more than its […]

16 Fertility Scenarios

Robin Hanson: World population is widely projected to peak around 2050-90 at roughly 9-11B, with ~40% living in Africa. World population would then decline. But how long, and how far? The median respondent in my Twitter polls expects a population revival ~2150, and only 15% see population falling below 2B. So most expect this to be a mild and temporary problem. But […]

Notes on Declining Student Population

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 […]

Ideology and higher education

Robert George: After the Supreme Court of the United States handed down its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization early last summer, Princeton University’s Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies issued a statementfiercely condemning the ruling. The director stated that the program stood “in solidarity” with the people whose rights had been allegedly stripped away by […]

UW-Madison Grad student and union efforts

David Blaska: The UW-Madison branch of Workers Strike Back met here late last month and plastered the campus with their signage. Their pitch is a “demand” for a yearly salary of $50,000. These are graduate degree students who help their professors grade papers, lead classes, and work at the lab. UW-Madison’s 5,400 graduate research and […]

Campus free speech censorship: Hunter College edition

Jonathan Turley It is obvious that the display is not just triggering for Rodríguez’s students given the professor’s unhinged response. It is all part of an anti-free speech movement that seeks to treat speech as harmful. Once this foundation is laid, any speech can then be curtailed or denied for the protection of others. This […]

Google contractors vote to unionize in historic landslide election

Stephen Council; A group of contracted YouTube workers based in Austin, Texas, voted to ratify a bargaining unit Wednesday afternoon, in an election historic for creating a union to bargain with a tech company and its contractor together as joint employers.  The unionization vote passed 41-0. The National Labor Relations Board representative counting the ballots […]

Advocating censorship at Yale

Hyerim Bianca Nam: This faith is shared, it seems, by both ends of the ideological spectrum. One of the angriest moments I’ve had at Yale was last year’s Bulldog Days, when I saw a table on cross campus that was manned by members of a pro-life club. Grouped around the table, which was spread with […]

Italian births drop to lowest level since country’s unification

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 […]

Taxpayer Supported ICE data mining

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 […]

DIE, Free Speech and the Stanford Law School

Tax Prof summary Stanford Law School’s chapter of the Federalist Society earlier this month invited Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Kyle Duncan to speak on campus. Student groups that vehemently opposed Judge Duncan’s prior advocacy and judicial decisions regarding same-sex marriage, immigration, trans people, abortion and other issues showed up to protest. Some protesters […]

Political Bias and Google’s bots

Paul Joseph Watson: Google’s Bard AI program mimics ChatGPT in that it is riddled with political bias, refusing to comment on Donald Trump or the evils of abortion, while effusively praising Joe Biden and the benefits of abortion. The company released its Bard chatbot to users in both the UK and US yesterday as part […]

What happens when people live to be very old and don’t have a passel of kids to take care of them?

Virginia Postrel: Most of the coverage of Japan’s aging population focuses on the current low birth rate and its implications for the future. In January, prime minister Fumio Kishida told legislators that the country is “on the brink of not being able to maintain social functions” because of its falling birth rate. “In thinking of […]

France’s baby bust

Guillaume Blanc : According to Alfred Sauvy, the French demographer who coined the term ‘third world’, in 1962, the decline in fertility is ‘the most important fact of the history of France’. France was eclipsed as Europe’s only real superpower by the relative growth of its rivals, most importantly England and Germany, in the nineteenth […]

Self Censorship on University of Wisconsin Campuses

Kayla Huyhn: A majority of University of Wisconsin System students don’t feel free to share their opinions about controversial topics or are unwilling to consider views they disagree with, according to results released Wednesday from a survey that has stirred controversy across the 13 campuses. Initial pushback led the System to postpone the first iteration of the survey last […]

Challenges to union control of local school governance were often successful.

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 […]

The global law firm fired me for defending the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.

Robin Keller: After the Supreme Court issued its Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade in June, global law firm Hogan Lovells organized an online conference call for female employees. As a retired equity partner still actively serving clients, I was invited to participate in what was billed as a “safe space” for women at the […]

Civics: “In three different incidents in Virginia, North Carolina and Oregon, no arrests have been made either, according to news reports”

Lucas Robinson: After more than six months, Madison police have not made an arrest in an arson at the office of an anti-abortion group, leading its director to question whether the organization’s political stance has slowed the momentum of the investigation. Wisconsin Family Action has had limited updates from Madison police since the arson in May, […]

“Anti-adoption drumbeat” leaves kids in foster care

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 […]

“The meek will inherit the earth, especially those humble enough to raise children”

Kevin DeYoung True, human beings are reproducing—but in most countries, not fast enough to replace themselves. Measuring total fertility rate (TFR) is not an exact science, so the numbers vary from source to source, but the trends are undeniable. Outside of Africa, which is home to forty-one of the fifty most fertile nations, the planet […]

K-12 tax & spending climate: declining live birth rates

Based on current fertility rates and age structures, here are the largest declines in population expected by the UN from 2022 to 2100: 🇰🇷 South Korea –53% 🇺🇦 Ukraine –49% 🇨🇳 China –46% 🇨🇺 Cuba –42% 🇵🇱 Poland –42% 🇯🇵 Japan –41% 🇬🇷 Greece –39% 🇮🇹 Italy –38% 🇹🇭 Thailand –38% — Edouard Mathieu (@redouad) […]

K-12 Governance Climate: But, the first strike in the fight happened in the northern suburbs of Chicago.

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 […]

The Supreme Court Is Blowing Up Law School, Too

Mark Joseph Stern: Khiara Bridges remembers the exact moment she lost faith in the Supreme Court. At first, at the start of Donald Trump’s presidency, Bridges—a professor who now teaches at UC–Berkeley School of Law—held out hope that the court might be “this great protector of individual civil liberties right when we desperately needed it […]

America’s indifference to its death crisis

Edward Luce: Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article […]

Civics: A discussion of Checks & Balances

John McGinnis: What differentiates a simple democracy from a republic is the complex system of checks and balances that the latter employs to promote both liberty and stability. In the federal American Republic, authorities are divided vertically between the states and the national government. Powers are also separated among the President, Congress. and federal Judiciary. The […]

Cost of Student Debt Cancelation Could Average $2,000 Per Taxpayer

Andrew Lautz: Public reporting indicates President Biden may soon announce executive action canceling federal student loan debt for a large set of borrowers. Though parameters of the student debt cancellation have yet to be announced, the Biden administration may cancel $10,000 of debt per borrower for borrowers making $125,000 in income per year or less. Based […]

We need to consider ways to reverse or at least slow rapid depopulation

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 […]

Google workers publicize concerns over search activity history (!)

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 […]

Parental rights demand parental responsibilities

Madeline Kearns: It is no coincidence that states with the greatest respect for parental rights have the least interventionist approaches to sex education. Florida, for instance, has no requirement for sex education but does require its health education in grades six through twelve to emphasize “awareness of the benefits of sexual abstinence as the expected […]

Civics: Laughing in the grave

Ann Althouse: Harris is obviously relying on that statement Ginsburg once made that we’d have been better off if the abortion question had been dealt with through the political process.* So why would she be laughing at him? The views are basically the same. Of course, when she got on the Court, she upheld the […]