by Alex Berenson, Unreported Truths:
At this rate no one is going to be around to replace anyone else.
From Asia to Europe to the Americas, across nations and races and religions, birth rates plunged again in 2023.
Countries across the developed world are having kids at levels far too low to keep their populations steady. Women must have about 2.1 children on average to maintain a stable population. But many wealthy and even middle-income countries are now below 1.5 kids per woman. Some are under 1, heralding demographic collapse.
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Birth rates have been slowly falling for a while. But last year’s drops were notable both for their severity and because they’re now happening sharply in countries that had largely avoided them, such as France. The United States is a striking exception. American births fell only about 2 percent in 2023, to roughly 3.6 million.
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The baby bust is most severe in East Asia, and China in particular.
Newly leaked data reveals that China recorded fewer than 8 million births in 2023. If that figure is confirmed, it will represent a decline of 17 percent from 2022, and an unfathomable drop of almost 60 percent since 2016.
Yes, you read that correctly.
In 2016, China – which has about 1.4 billion people – reported 18.8 million births, according to Caixin, a Beijing-based investigative magazine. (Although every Chinese news organization faces government censorship, Caixin is still reasonably reliable.)
But by 2019, even before Covid and China’s harsh lockdowns, births had fallen to 14.7 million. Since then, they have plunged even faster. By one estimate, China had fewer children born in 2022 than it did in 1790.
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(Zero-child policy.)
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Sociologists and political scientists have blamed China’s worsening political repression and its slowing economic growth for the sudden baby bust.
But China, which is far richer than it was a generation ago, is also simply falling in line with smaller East Asian neighbors like Taiwan and Singapore. Those countries have had low fertility rates for decades, yet their birth rates are still falling.
The East Asian baby bust is not limited to ethnic Chinese, either. Women in Thailand and Japan now have an average roughly 1.2 children. And South Korea, the world leader in this unfortunate limbo, hit a record low of about 0.7 children per woman. South Korea has almost 52 million people. Women there had roughly the same number of births in 2023 as Florida, which has just over 22 million.
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Births are plunging in Europe, too, particularly in northern European countries such as France, which had posted relatively high fertility rates – in part because of Muslim immigrants. Across a swath of Europe from Ireland to Germany to Finland, births are down more than 10 percent in the last two years, with women now expected to have roughly 1.3-1.5 children on average. (France is still slightly higher.)
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