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alexdeltufo

Only Republican Voters Can Stop Donald Trump Now - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...ters-can-stop-donald-trump-now

shared by alexdeltufo on 15 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Thursday night, Donald Trump stepped off a stage at the North Charleston Coliseum, in South Carolina,
  • Chances are we will be seeing more of them
  • Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush, who took their shots at the billionaire from New York, the other candidates seemed to have given up any hope of standing up to him.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • fter the debate finished, Ari Fleischer, George W. Bush’s former spokesman, estimated on Twitter that Trump now had a sixty per cent chance of getting the nomination. That’s just one person’s opinion, of course, but it reflects a widespread fatalism in the Republican establishment
  • a loan from Goldman Sachs to help fund his 2012 Senate campaign, during which he had portrayed himself as an enemy of Wall Street and Wall Street bailouts
  • “If that’s the best the New York Times has got, they better go back to the well.”
  • Rather than disowning his words, or correcting them to make it clear that he wasn’t trying to insult millions of people, Cruz doubled down, saying
  • There followed a lengthy interchange, in which Cruz displayed the verbal skills that made him a champion debater in college, and Trump was reduced to claiming he had only brought it up to spare the Republican Party
  • “I’ve spent my entire life defending the Constitution before the U.S. Supreme Court. And I’ll tell you, I’m not going to be taking legal advice from Donald Trump.”
  • Unfortunately for him, he appeared to let it go to his head. Trump, as the boxing promoter Don King sagely noted some time ago, is a counter-puncher:
  • he should have proceeded with caution.
  • “You know, back in September, my friend Donald said that he had had his lawyers look at this from every which way, and there was no issue there.
  • And, he said, “Not a lot of conservatives come out of Manhattan. I’m just saying.
  • New York is a great place. It’s got great people, it’s got loving people, wonderful people. 
  • u had two one hundred—you had two one-hundred-and-ten-story buildings come crashing down.
  • And we rebuilt downtown Manhattan, and everybody in the world watched, and everybody in the world loved New York and loved New Yorkers. And I have to tell you, that was a very insulting statement that Ted made.
  • . One of those clapping for him, the cameras showed, was Cruz. Evidently realizing that he had exposed himself to being cast on the wrong side of 9/11,
  • This was Trump’s best moment in any of the debates. From then on, Cruz and Trump mostly left each other alone and concentrated on the other candidates. In another notable exchange later in the debate, on immigration and taxes,
  • First and foremost, this issue has to be now, more than anything else, about keeping this country safe,”
  • Chris Christie, who may be his main rival for the role of representing the wing of the G.O.P.
  • aying that he never wrote a check to Planned Parenthood or supported the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court.
  • “terrorism is on the run” when he evidently meant to say that it is on the rise.
  • We’re running for the Presidency of the United States here,” Bush said. “You cannot make rash statements and expect the rest of the world to respond as though, well, it’s just politics.”
  • So is playing to the prejudices and fears of his supporters, and hinting that dark things are asunder, which justify drastic and possibly authoritarian measures.
  • “There is something going on and it’s bad,” he said. “We have to get to the bottom of it. We need security.”
  • To this end, he said that he was willing to give up his businesses and let his children run them.
  • “But if I become President, I couldn’t care less about my company. It’s peanuts. I want to use that same up here,”
  • I have Ivanka and Eric and Don sitting there. Run the company kids, have a good time. I’m going to do it for America.”
knudsenlu

How Donald Trump is weaponising the courts for political ends | US news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...p-judges-courts-justice-system

donald trump courts politics US LGBT

shared by knudsenlu on 01 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • t was a startling omission, even according to the peculiar moral norms of the Trump era. When Wendy Vitter, one of the US president’s judicial nominees, was asked whether she supported the supreme court’s 1954 Brown v Board of Education decision to end racial segregation in schools – a near sacred pillar of progress for civil rights in the 20th century – she did not say yes.
  • With just over a year in office, Donald Trump has already appointed 21 of America’s 167 current circuit judges and intends to fill an additional 20 or more vacancies by the end of the year. He is far outpacing Barack Obama, whose 21st circuit court nominee was approved 33 months into his presidency amid gridlock in Congress. Seventeen of Trump’s nominees for district courts, most of whom replaced Democratic appointees, have also been approved by the Republican-controlled Senate.
  • “This is stunning,” said Christopher Kang, former deputy counsel to Barack Obama, who for more than four years was in charge of the selection, vetting and confirmation of Obama’s judicial nominees. “Conservatives are using the courts to bring us back to a time when ‘religious liberty’ allowed discrimination. We’re seeing legal arguments we had hoped were consigned to the dustbin of history being dusted off and used again in the hope of turning back the clock on the way we treat all Americans.” Four cases relating to Trump’s ban on transgender personnel in the military are working their way through the courts. Employment and housing protections for LGBT individuals could be at risk. Battles over reproductive rights are also under way at state level. Last month a federal appeals court blocked an Ohio law that would cut taxpayer funding to 28 Planned Parenthood clinics, holding that conditions it imposed that denied funds to abortion providers were unconstitutional. But campaigners against abortion rights are unlikely to be deterred.
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  • Progressives have in recent years won landmark victories on issues such as same sex marriage and transgender rights. But conservatives, sensing the wind changing in their favour, may push significantly harder on issues such as environmental regulations, land rights, racial profiling, trade unions and reproductive and voting rights
saberal

'It's easy to dismiss Black women's lives': Texas drags feet on maternal mortality cris... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ty-crisis-black-women-medicaid

US politics crisis

shared by saberal on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • When medical staff prepped Shawn Thierry for an emergency C-section, she knew something was very wrong. After an epidural, excruciating pain ran through her legs. Soon, she could barely breathe.
  • The US has the highest maternal death rate among similarly developed countries and is the only industrialized nation where such deaths are rising. But according to data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in Texas the maternal mortality rate is above the US average, at 18.5 deaths per 100,000 live births.
  • They did not advance in 2019, or in the current legislative session which ends this weekend. Focused on restricting abortion rights, the male- and Republican-dominated state legislature has dragged its feet on maternal mortality.
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  • “It was really striking,” said Dr Amy Raines-Milenkov, a University of North Texas Health Science Center professor and member of the review committee. “We found that most of these deaths could have been prevented but the system is just not set up to prevent them. And we found a large racial disparity, which is a reflection of how we in society value women, especially African American women.”
  • the ultra-conservative Texas Senate – which ushered through extremist anti-abortion bills in March – did not pass the bill until the final minutes of its session. Even then, the legislation was not what was proposed. Without explanation, Republican Lois Kolkhorst of Brenham reduced the year of coverage to six months.
  • “Black women are dying at an alarming rate for reasons that could be prevented and our state leaders cut down the main proposal that a state-appointed committee recommended to help them – why would that even happen?” said Jones. “I think it’s because it’s so easy to dismiss Black women’s lives.”
  • In an ideological quest to punish abortion affiliates, Republicans have decimated the Texas reproductive health safety net by blocking low-income Medicaid patients from receiving life-saving preventative care at Planned Parenthood, a move resulting in reduced access to contraception and increased rates of Medicaid births, according to the Texas Policy Evaluation Project.
aleija

Supreme Court to Hear Abortion Case Challenging Roe v. Wade - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...supreme-court-abortion.html

Politics us opinion court

shared by aleija on 17 May 21 - No Cached
  • The Supreme Court on Monday said it would hear a case from Mississippi that could undermine Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that established a constitutional right to abortion.
  • The new case, concerning a state law that seeks to ban abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, will give the court’s new 6-to-3 majority its first opportunity to address the subject, and supporters of abortion rights reacted to the development with dismay.
  • The Supreme Court just agreed to review an abortion ban that unquestionably violates nearly 50 years of Supreme Court precedent and is a test case to overturn Roe v. Wade.
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  • I remain committed to advocating for women and defending Mississippi’s legal right to protect the unborn.
  • Last summer, the Supreme Court struck down a restrictive Louisiana abortion law by a 5-to-4 margin, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. providing the decisive vote. His concurring opinion, which expressed respect for precedent but proposed a relatively relaxed standard for evaluating abortion restrictions, signaled an incremental approach to cutting back on abortion rights.
  • The court’s decision to hear the Mississippi case, after considering it more than a dozen times at the justices’ private conferences, is an indication of sharp divisions among the court’s conservatives about how boldly to address the constitutional status of abortion rights.
  • Since the retirement in 2018 of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, state legislatures have enacted scores of abortion restrictions and bans in the hope that personnel changes at the court will spur it to reconsider its abortion jurisprudence.
  • Lower courts said the law was plainly unconstitutional under Roe, which forbids states from banning abortions before fetal viability — the point at which fetuses can sustain life outside the womb, or around 23 or 24 weeks.
  • Mississippi’s sole abortion clinic sued, saying the law ran afoul of Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 decision that affirmed Roe’s core holding.
  • The precise question the justices agreed to decide was “whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional.”
martinelligi

How Biden's Catholicism Could Influence The Abortion Debate : President Biden Takes Off... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...hts-heres-what-that-could-mean

biden policy

shared by martinelligi on 25 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Joe Biden is only the second Catholic president of the United States. He's also a supporter of abortion rights — a position at odds with official teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.
  • Jamie Manson, president of Catholics for Choice, said she hopes for what she describes as a "better dialogue" between church leaders and some rank-and-file Catholics who disagree with aspects of the church's teachings.
  • Polling suggests a majority of American Catholics support abortion rights in most or all cases and oppose overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide.
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  • Conservative Catholics, meanwhile, worry that Biden will roll back Trump administration policies that they've seen as victories for religious liberty or the goal of restricting abortion.
Javier E

Masks and school dress codes: If you can punish a teenage girl for spaghetti straps, yo... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-b205-ff838e15a9a6_story.html

school dress code pandemic mask requirement culture abortion choice

shared by Javier E on 12 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • For government officials:Legislate the “personal choice” of mask noncompliance the way you have for decades tried to legislate women over their own deeply personal decisions.
  • After refusing to wear a mask or to instruct his staff to work remotely, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) tested positive for the coronavirus. He then tweeted that he would be taking hydroxychloroquine, despite top infectious-disease specialists, including Anthony S. Fauci, noting that the anti-malarial drug has not been proved an effective treatment. “It is what was decided as the best course of action between my doctor and me — not by government bureaucrats,” Gohmert wrote.
  • Was he plagiarizing Busy Philipps? Because last year at a hearing on abortion, the actor and activist told Gohmert, “I don’t believe that a politician’s place is to decide what’s best for a woman. It’s a choice between a woman and her doctor.”
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  • Gohmert, who is antiabortion, was not persuaded then. He has repeatedly shown he feels it is exactly his business, as a government bureaucrat, to regulate individuals’ conversations with their doctors. At a House hearing he once said women should carry a brain-dead fetus to term.
  • In a funhouse-mirror situation, the de facto slogan of the anti-mask crowd has become “My body, my choice,” the chant originally created by women in the abortion rights movement. In that context, the goal was to argue that a woman’s decisions about her health, her family, her morals and her soul were up to her, possibly in consultation with her doctor, her partner or her pastor.
  • You might believe that abortion is murder, but you cannot say that it is contagious and airborne, something you can catch or transmit unknowingly to others. You cannot argue that, upon choosing to have an abortion, a pregnant person walks into a grocery store and infects 50 other innocent shoppers with abortion.
  • public health concerns are completely different from individual medical procedures.
  • But if that’s the comparison that anti-mask folks want to make — fine. Prepare to be judged and harangued the way women are for seeking abortions. And prepare to deserve it, because unlike what goes on inside a Planned Parenthood clinic, public health actually is the business of the public.
  • I don’t think this is about the ability to enforce mandates. Schools, legislators and workplaces have all found ways to enforce mandates on women’s bodies, or gender nonconforming bodies, for years. This is about a sickness that is far more pervasive than the coronavirus: the belief that one’s comfort is more important than someone else’s life.
  • The stubborn resistance to science for reasons that often boil down to, “I don’t wanna.”
  • The refusal to acknowledge that living in a functioning society sometimes means sacrificing a tiny smidgen of personal liberty for the well-being of the group
  • — and that there are circumstances exceeding the boundaries of taste and discretion, where those sacrifices should be mandated: The presence of a deadly virus in the halls of a school is a better reason to enforce a dress code than the presence of bare shoulders.
hannahcarter11

Sen. Jason Rapert files bill to end abortion in Arkansas | KATV - 0 views

katv.com/...ll-to-end-abortion-in-arkansas

arkansas abortion bill Roe v. Wade

shared by hannahcarter11 on 19 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Republican Senator Jason Rapert and Rep. Mary Bentley filed a bill on Wednesday that would make abortion illegal in Arkansas except when the mother’s life is at stake.
  • If passed, the bill will generally prohibit abortion in Arkansas and give the U.S. Supreme Court an opportunity to overturn Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and other pro-abortion decisions.
  • A conservative education and research organization, Family Council, showed support for the bill.
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  • This is an opportunity for Arkansas to be a real leader in the effort to end abortion in America.”
  • public opinion polling shows Arkansans oppose abortion and that the organization will work to mobilize Arkansans to support S.B. 6.
  • He referred to the decision as a "crime against humanity."
Javier E

Opinion | Overturning Roe Is a Radical, Not Conservative, Choice - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...upreme-court-conservative.html

conservative conservatism scotus abortion prudence culture politics

shared by Javier E on 04 May 22 - No Cached
  • What is conservative? It is, above all, the conviction that abrupt and profound changes to established laws and common expectations are utterly destructive to respect for the law and the institutions established to uphold it — especially when those changes are instigated from above, with neither democratic consent nor broad consensus.
  • As conservatives, you are philosophically bound to give considerable weight to judicial precedents, particularly when they have been ratified and refined — as Roe was by the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision — over a long period.
  • It’s also a matter of originalism. “To avoid an arbitrary discretion in the courts,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 78, “it is indispensable that they” — the judges — “should be bound down by strict rules and precedents, which serve to define and point out their duty in every particular case that comes before them.”
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  • the core purpose of the courts isn’t to engage in (unavoidably selective) textual exegetics to arrive at preferred conclusions. It’s to avoid an arbitrary discretion — to resist the temptation to seek to reshape the entire moral landscape of a vast society based on the preferences of two or three people at a single moment.
  • Beware of unintended consequences. Those include the return of the old, often unsafe, illegal abortion (or abortions in Mexico), the entrenchment of pro-choice majorities in blue states and the likely consolidation of pro-choice majorities in many purple states, driven by voters newly anxious over their reproductive rights.
  • In reality, you will be lighting another cultural fire — one that took decades to get under control — in a country already ablaze over racial issues, school curriculums, criminal justice, election laws, sundry conspiracy theories and so on.
  • And what will the effect be on the court itself? Here, again, you may be tempted to think that overturning Roe is an act of judicial modesty that puts abortion disputes in the hands of legislatures. Maybe — after 30 years of division and mayhem.
  • Yet the decision will also discredit the court as a steward of whatever is left of American steadiness and sanity, and as a bulwark against our fast-depleting respect for institutions and tradition.
  • A court that betrays the trust of Americans on an issue that affects so many, so personally, will lose their trust on every other issue as well.
  • The word “conservative” encompasses many ideas and habits, none more important than prudence. Justices: Be prudent.
Javier E

Fun is dead. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...fun-is-dead

fun joy pleasure social media work US

shared by Javier E on 24 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • Sometime in recent history, possibly around 2004, Americans forgot to have fun, true fun, as though they’d misplaced it like a sock.
  • Instead, fun evolved into work, sometimes more than true work, which is where we find ourselves now.
  • Fun is often emphatic, exhausting, scheduled, pigeonholed, hyped, forced and performative
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  • Things that were long big fun now overwhelm, exhaust and annoy. The holiday season is an extended exercise in excess and loud, often sleazy sweaters.
  • Which means it is nothing of the sort. This is the drag equivalent of fun and suggests that fun is done.
  • Adults assiduously record themselves appearing to have something masquerading as “fun,” a fusillade of Coachellic micro social aggressions unleashed on multiple social media platforms. Look at me having so much FUN!
  • “I feel like I should be having more fun than I’m actually having,” says Alyssa Alvarez, a social media marketing manager and DJ in Detroit, expressing a sentiment that many share. “There are expectations of what I want people to believe that my life is like rather than what my life is actually like.”
  • Weddings have morphed into multistage stress extravaganzas while doubling as express paths to insolvency: destination proposals for the whole family, destination bachelorette and bachelor blowouts, destination weddings in remote barns with limited lodging, something called a “buddymoon” (bring the gang!) and planners to help facilitate the same custom cocktailsness of it all.
  • What could be a greater cause for joy or more natural than having a baby? Apparently, not much these days. Impending parenthood is overthought and over-apped, incorporating more savings-draining events that didn’t exist a few decades ago: babymoons and lethal, fire-inducing, gender-reveal gatherings and baby showers so over-the-top as to shame weddings.
  • Retirements must be purposeful. Also, occasions for an acute identity crisis. You need to have a plan, a mission, a coach, a packed color-coded grid of daily activities in a culture where our jobs are our identities, our worth tied to employment.
  • Vacations are overscheduled with too many activities, FOMO on steroids, a paradox of choice-inducing decision fatigue, so much so that people return home exhausted and in need of another one.
  • “The world is so much less about human connection,” says Amanda Richards, 34, who works in casting in Los Angeles and is a graduate of Cudworth’s course. “We do more things virtually. People are more isolated. And there’s all this toxic positivity to convince people of how happy you are.”
  • For eons, early adulthood was considered an age of peak fun. Now, according to several studies, it’s a protracted state of anxiety and depression.
  • Because there is now a coach for everything, Alvarez hired the “party coach” Evan Cudworth, taking his $497 course this fall on how to pursue “intentional fun.” (It now costs $555.)
  • Instead of this being the most wonderful time of the year, we battle holiday fatigue, relentless beseeching for our money and, if Fox News is to be believed, a war on Christmas that is nearing its third decade.
  • Blame it on technological advances that tether us to work without cessation
  • Blame it on the pandemic, which exacerbated so much while delivering Zoomageddon.
  • Blame it on 2004, with the advent of Facebook, which led to Twitter (okay, X), Instagram, Threads, TikTok and who-knows-what lurking in the ether.
  • Blame it again on 2004 and the introduction of FOMO, our dread of missing out, broadcast through multiple social media spigots
  • “So many people are retreating into their phones, into anxiety,” says Cudworth, 37, from Chicago. “I’m helping people rediscover what fun means to them.”
  • His mandate is redefining fun: cutting back on bingeing screen time, eradicating envy scrolling, getting outside, moving, dancing. “With technology, we don’t allow ourselves to be present. You’re always thinking ‘something is better around the corner,’” Cudworth says, the now squandered in pursuit of the future.
  • Blame it on an American culture that values work, productivity, power, wealth, status and more work over leisure
  • ow do Americans spend their leisure hours when they might be having fun with others, making those vital in-person connections? Watching television, our favorite free time and “sports activity” (yes, that’s how it’s classified), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an average of 2.8 hours daily.
  • “That’s way more television than you really need. We put play on the back burner,” says Pat Rumbaugh, 65, of Takoma Park, Md. She’s “The Play Lady,” who organizes unorganized play for adults
  • Catherine Price, the author of “The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again,” believes “we’re totally misdoing leisure” and “not leaving any room for spontaneity.”
  • To Price, True Fun is the confluence of connection (other people, nature), playfulness (lightheartedness, freedom) and flow (being fully engaged, present), which is not as challenging as it sounds. “You can have fun in any context. Playfulness is about an attitude,”
  • Back in the day, co-workers were friends. (Sometimes, more.) After hours, they gathered for drinks, played softball. Today, because of email, Slack and remote work, offices are half empty and far quieter than libraries.
  • “We go to work and there’s no sense of connection and camaraderie,” says Davis, who was long employed by his city’s department of parks and recreation. “People feel emotionally disconnected. Healthy conversations are the precursor of fun. We’ve lost the art of communication. Our spirit comes home with us. If you don’t communicate at work, what are you coming home with?”
Javier E

Suddenly There Aren't Enough Babies. The Whole World Is Alarmed. - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-global-decline-cause-ddaf8be2

population demographic revolution decline global response

shared by Javier E on 14 May 24 - No Cached
  • The world is at a startling demographic milestone. Sometime soon, the global fertility rate will drop below the point needed to keep population constant. It may have already happened.
  • Fertility is falling almost everywhere, for women across all levels of income, education and labor-force participation.
  • Governments have rolled out programs to stop the decline—but so far they’ve barely made a dent.
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  • It’s dropping in developing countries, too. India surpassed China as the most populous country last year, yet its fertility is now below replacement.
  • “The demographic winter is coming,”
  • Smaller populations come with diminished global clout, raising questions in the U.S., China and Russia about their long-term standings as superpowers.
  • Some demographers think the world’s population could start shrinking within four decades—one of the few times it’s happened in history.
  • A year ago Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida declared that the collapse of the country’s birthrate left it “standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society.”
  • Had fertility stayed near 2.1, where it stood in 2007, the U.S. would have welcomed an estimated 10.6 million more babies since
  • In 2017, when the global fertility rate—a snapshot of how many babies a woman is expected to have over her lifetime—was 2.5, the United Nations thought it would slip to 2.4 in the late 2020s. Yet by 2021, the U.N. concluded, it was already down to 2.3—close to what demographers consider the global replacement rate of about 2.2
  • He has found that national birth registries are typically reporting births 10% to 20% below what the U.N. projected.
  • China reported 9 million births last year, 16% less than projected in the U.N.’s central scenario. In the U.S., 3.59 million babies were born last year, 4% less than the U.N. projected. In other countries, the undershoot is even larger: Egypt reported 17% fewer births last year. In 2022, Kenya reported 18% fewer.
  • In 2017 the U.N. projected world population, then 7.6 billion, would keep climbing to 11.2 billion in 2100. By 2022 it had lowered and brought forward the peak to 10.4 billion in the 2080s. That, too, is likely out of date
  • the University of Washington now thinks it will peak around 9.5 billion in 2061 then start declining. 
  • The falling birthrates come with huge implications for the way people live, how economies grow and the standings of the world’s superpowers.
  • In the U.S., a short-lived pandemic baby boomlet has reversed. The total fertility rate fell to 1.62 last year, according to provisional government figures, the lowest on record.
  • In 2017, when the fertility rate was 1.8, the Census Bureau projected it would converge over the long run to 2.0. It has since revised that down to 1.5. “It has snuck up on us,”
  • Historians refer to the decline in fertility that began in the 18th century in industrializing countries as the demographic transition. As lifespans lengthened and more children survived to adulthood, the impetus for bearing more children declined. As women became better educated and joined the workforce, they delayed marriage and childbirth, resulting in fewer children. 
  • Some demographers see this as part of a “second demographic transition,” a societywide reorientation toward individualism that puts less emphasis on marriage and parenthood, and makes fewer or no children more acceptable. 
  • In research published in 2021, the University of Maryland’s Kearney and two co-authors looked for possible explanations for the continued drop. They found that state-level differences in parental abortion notification laws, unemployment, Medicaid availability, housing costs, contraceptive usage, religiosity, child-care costs and student debt could explain almost none of the decline
  • “We suspect that this shift reflects broad societal changes that are hard to measure or quantify,” they conclude.
  • while raising children is no more expensive than before, parents’ preferences and perceived constraints have changed
  • “If people have a preference for spending time building a career, on leisure, relationships outside the home, that’s more likely to come in conflict with childbearing.” 
  • Once a low fertility cycle kicks in, it effectively resets a society’s norms and is thus hard to break, said Jackson. “The fewer children you see your colleagues and peers and neighbors having, it changes the whole social climate,”
  • Fertility is below replacement in India even though the country is still poor and many women don’t work—factors that usually sustain fertility.
  • Urbanization and the internet have given even women in traditional male-dominated villages a glimpse of societies where fewer children and a higher quality of life are the norm. “People are plugged into the global culture,
  • mothers and fathers, especially those that are highly educated, spend more time with their children than in the past. “The intensity of parenting is a constraint,”
  • Sub-Saharan Africa once appeared resistant to the global slide in fertility, but that too is changing. The share of all women of reproductive age using modern contraception grew from 17% in 2012 to 23% in 2022
  • Jose Rimon, a professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University, credits that to a push by national leaders in Africa which, he predicted, would drive fertility down faster than the U.N. projects. 
  • Mae Mariyam Thomas, 38, who lives in Mumbai and runs an audio production company, said she’s opted against having children because she never felt the tug of motherhood. She sees peers struggling to meet the right person, getting married later and, in some instances, divorcing before they have kids. At least three of her friends have frozen their eggs,
  • Danielle Vermeer grew up third in a family of four children on Chicago’s North Side, where her neighborhood was filled with Catholics of Italian, Irish and Polish descent and half her close friends had as many siblings as her or more.
  • Her Italian-American father was one of four children who produced 14 grandchildren. Now her parents have five grandchildren, including Vermeer’s two children, ages 4 and 7.
  • The 35-year-old, who is the co-founder of a fashion thrifting app, said that before setting out to have children, she consulted dozens of other couples and her Catholic church and read at least eight books on the subject, including one by Pope Paul VI. She and her husband settled on two as the right number.“The act of bringing a child into this world is an incredible responsibility,” she said.
  • Perhaps no country has been trying longer than Japan. After fertility fell to 1.5 in the early 1990s, the government rolled out a succession of plans that included parental leave and subsidized child care. Fertility kept falling.
  • In 2005, Kuniko Inoguchi was appointed the country’s first minister responsible for gender equality and birthrate. The main obstacle, she declared, was money: People couldn’t afford to get married or have children. Japan made hospital maternity care free and introduced a stipend paid upon birth of the child. 
  • Japan’s fertility rate climbed from 1.26 in 2005 to 1.45 in 2015. But then it started declining again, and in 2022 was back to 1.26.
  • This year, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida rolled out yet another program to increase births that extends monthly allowances to all children under 18 regardless of income, free college for families with three children, and fully paid parental leave.
  • noguchi, now a member of parliament’s upper house, said the constraint on would-be parents is no longer money, but time. She has pressed the government and businesses to adopt a four-day workweek
  • If you’re a government official or manager of a big corporation, you should not worry over questions of salary now, but that in 20 years time you will have no customers, no clients, no applicants to the Self-Defense Forces.”
  • Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has pushed one of Europe’s most ambitious natality agendas. Last year he expanded tax benefits for mothers so that women under the age of 30 who have a child are exempt from paying personal income tax for life. That’s on top of housing and child-care subsidies as well as generous maternity leaves. 
  • Hungary’s fertility rate, though still well below replacement, has risen since 2010. But the Vienna Institute of Demography attributed this primarily to women delaying childbirth because of a debt crisis that hit around 2010. Adjusted for that, fertility has risen only slightly, it concluded.
  • The usual prescription in advanced countries is more immigration, but that has two problems.
  • With no reversal in birthrates in sight, the attendant economic pressures are intensifying. Since the pandemic, labor shortages have become endemic throughout developed countries. That will only worsen in coming years as the postcrisis fall in birthrates yields an ever-shrinking inflow of young workers, placing more strain on healthcare and retirement systems.
  • worsening demographics could make this a second consecutive “lost decade” for global economic growth.
  • The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation found little evidence that pronatalist policies lead to sustained rebounds in fertility. A woman may get pregnant sooner to capture a baby bonus, researchers say, but likely won’t have more kids over the course of her lifetime.
  • As more countries confront stagnant population, immigration between them is a zero-sum gam
  • Historically, host countries have sought skilled migrants who enter through formal, legal channels, but recent inflows have been predominantly unskilled migrants often entering illegally and claiming asylum.
  • High levels of immigration have also historically aroused political resistance,
  • Many of the leaders keenest to raise birthrates are most resistant to immigratio
  • As birthrates fall, more regions and communities experience depopulation, with consequences ranging from closed schools to stagnant property values. Less selective colleges will soon struggle to fill classrooms because of the plunge in birthrates that began in 2007, said Fernández-Villaverde. Vance said rural hospitals can’t stay open because of the falling local population.
  • An economy with fewer children will struggle to finance pensions and healthcare for growing ranks of elderly. South Korea’s national pension fund, one of the world’s largest, is on track to be depleted by 2055
  • There’s been little public pressure to act, said Sok Chul Hong, an economist at Seoul National University. “The elderly are not very interested in pension reform, and the youth are apathetic towards politics,” he said. “It is truly an ironic situation.”
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