The ‘Conscience of Europe?’ Navigating Shifting Tides at the European Court of Human Rights Robert Clarke, Ed. Kairos Publishing, 2017; 240 pages, £17.97 (As Dr. Portaru is one of the authors whose work is contained in this volume, this essay is meant as a presentation of the book, rather than a formal review.) The European […]
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Prime Minister Viktor Orbán On May 24-28 of this year, friends of the family from around the globe gathered in beautiful and historic Budapest, Hungary, for the Second Budapest Demographic Forum and World Congress of Families XI. The theme of the joint meeting was “Building Family-Friendly Nations: Making Families Strong Again,” and demography was a […]
Read MoreOften under the influence of professors, a growing number of university students around the world decide to delay parenthood and family life. Do the students who make such decisions realize the biological challenges they may face as a consequence of such delays? A new Danish study reveals that many university students remain woefully ignorant of […]
Read MoreThe bread-winning father? For progressive thinkers, he’s an irrelevant anachronism—a laughable stereotype straight out of Ozzie and Harriet. Perhaps these progressive thinkers are not paying much attention to the well-being of children around the world. For children have suffered wherever bread-winning fathers have disappeared. The latest evidence that children pay the price when bread-winning fathers […]
Read MoreEducation has established itself as a god term in progressive circles. Name any problem whatever—from global warming to grade-school bullying—and progressives will begin to genuflect and burn incense before the shrines of education, certain that academe can save us. Their solo fide progressive credo blocks from view the way that educational attainment actually depends on […]
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Childlessness in Europe: Contexts, Causes, and Consequences Michaela Kreyenfeld and Dirk Konietzka, eds. SpringerOpen, 2017; 370 pages, open access eBook In his brilliant 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley anticipated a future in which the word mother has become an “obscenity,” “a pornographic impropriety.” If Huxley were alive today, he would find compelling […]
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How Population Change Will Transform Our World Sarah Harper Oxford University Press, 2016; 160 pages, $24.95 Throughout the last 40-plus years of the no-fault divorce revolution, observers have noticed a phenomenon aptly labeled “divorce happy talk.” This is an attempt by adults to overcome the initial distress we might feel about the spike in divorces, […]
Read MoreThe History and Significance of the Wedding Cake Wedding cakes today are in the news and legal briefs, as same-sex couples occasionally conflict with caterers with religious objections who refuse to prepare a cake for their wedding. The nature and resolution of this dispute is not the subject of this essay, at least not directly; […]
Read MoreIncreasing Mortality and Decreasing Fertility in America In late 2016, news sources across the U.S. reported a sobering statistic: The average life expectancy of Americans had fallen for the first time since 1993. The numbers are not, in some ways, startling. For an American man born in 2015, the average life expectancy dropped from 76.5 […]
Read MoreGood News At Last? Demographers, policy-makers, and ordinary citizens have long been concerned about the current demographic situation in Europe. European fertility has dipped well below a replacement fertility rate and inspired the term “lowest-low” fertility, referring to a total fertility rate (TFR) below 1.3.[1] The emergence of lowest-low fertility occurred relatively quickly. In 1990, […]
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