Soaring birth rates in developing nations are fuelling a global baby boom while women in dozens of richer countries aren’t producing enough children to maintain population levels there, according to figures released Friday.
Chinese state media noted on Wednesday that at least one province in the country is considering offering financial rewards to couples to incentivize them to have children, following an unsuccessful campaign to increase the country’s birth rate that began with a loosening of the previous one-child policy.
The number of childbirths in Germany has declined for years but a recent report has shown a rebound as migrant women accounted for almost one in four mothers in the country in 2016.
The Swedish medical research university-hospital Karolinska has created a video to educate new and expecting mothers but has had to make versions in Arabic and Somalian as midwives say there has been a sharp rise in births to mothers who do not speak Swedish.
Russia’s demographic crisis was put in stark terms by Ilan Berman in a Moscow Times editorial on Tuesday, as he quoted a report from Russia’s statistics agency that spoke of “extinction.”
TEL AVIV — An Egyptian Member of Parliament has demanded that couples’ engagement periods be regulated by law before the wedding and that couples who decide to cancel the engagement without proper justification be punished.
According to China’s state-run Xinhua news agency, hospitals have been overwhelmed by a surge of babies following the end of the nation’s one-child population-control policy.
Economist Nicholas Eberstadt lays out a bleak future in an important essay just published in The Wall Street Journal. Eberstadt makes the case that selfishness, as evidenced by the unwillingness of people to get married in the first place and stay married in the second, is setting humanity on an unknown and potentially dangerous course.
