Excerpt from CBS News:
When the pandemic first took hold in the U.S., many joked that widespread lockdowns would spark a “baby boom” and sky-high birth rates. But nearly a year later, the opposite appears to be true.
Provisional birth rate data provided to CBS News by 29 state health departments shows a roughly 7.3% decline in births in December 2020, nine months after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization. California, the most populous state, reported a 10.2% decline, falling to 32,910 births in December from 36,651 the year prior. In the same time frame, births declined by 30.4% in Hawaii.
While birth rates have been falling for nearly a decade, Phil Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, said December’s drop was the biggest he’s seen since the baby boom ended in 1964.
“The scale of this is really large,” Cohen said in a telephone interview with CBS News. “Regardless of whether you think it’s good or bad to have a lot of children, the fact that we’re suddenly having fewer means things are not going well for a lot of people.”
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Provisional birth rate data provided to CBS News by 29 state health departments shows a roughly 7.3% decline in births in December 2020, nine months after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization. California, the most populous state, reported a 10.2% decline, falling to 32,910 births in December from 36,651 the year prior. In the same time frame, births declined by 30.4% in Hawaii.
And now for the Holy Land, from Jpost of Jan. 15:21, quoting Haaretz’s top researchers in its TheMarker, complete with leftist\Malthusian hand-wringing:
The subhead predicts that by 2065, “Israel is slated” to be the most crowded nation on earth, with the exception of Bangladesh. The author asks, “Can Israel continue to grow like Nigeria while maintaining a standard of living like Holland?”
Israel’s population is indeed growing 2% a year, four times the average of just 0.5% in other developed countries.
Let me ask, dear reader, is this the good news or the bad news?
In the aforementioned Holland, for instance, demographers are celebrating a 0.24% birthrate increased to 1.668 births per woman in 2019. The fertility rate for Nigeria in 2020 was 5.28 births per woman, a slight decrease. The literacy rate for Nigerian women is 52.7%.
Why is this relevant? Because, according to the World Bank, “a negative correlation is most clearly seen between different levels of female education and total fertility rate in a population.” In other words, the more schooling a woman has, the fewer children she is likely to bear.
This is true in most countries, but it’s not true overall in Israel, where women’s matriculation in higher education has grown in addition to our fertility, outstripping the number of men who go on to university. We – Jewish, Christian, Muslim women all together – have more years of formal education than the OECD average.
And according to the nonpartisan Taub Institute, “Israel’s fertility is not only exceptional because it is high. It is exceptional because strong pronatalist norms cut across all educational classes and levels of religiosity, and because fertility has been increasing alongside increasing age at first birth and education – at least in the Jewish population. From an international perspective, these are atypical patterns.”
And what’s driving this increase? Not the large haredi and Arab families, but so-called secular and traditional families. Middle-class families want a fourth child. Children of Russian immigrants who grew up with small families want more children.
ברוך משמח ציון בבניה!
Not surprisingly, the larger families in the religious Jewish and Muslim sectors do get special attention in the year’s end article as examples of what’s supposedly wrong with large families.
They have indeed been hot spots of the coronavirus, but so are the less affluent areas in most countries. You don’t see major newspapers in the United States suggesting that congested inner-city residents who have high rates of COVID-19 should have smaller families. Journalists would be accused of racism.