Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements You have to wonder if Paul Ehrlich ever thought he’d live to 93. The biologist and writer – his initial specialty was butterflies, though his ambitions proved much broader – had his death announced this March to what can only be described as a mix of tributes and mockery. We should, according [...]
Thousands of youth march for life in Paris On Jan. 18, about 10,000 people gathered in front of the ‘iconic’ Invalides palace in Paris, France. (The palace includes the Cathedral of Saint-Louis-des-Invalides; the resting place of Napoleon Bonaparte; and was commissioned as a hospital and retirement home for disabled soldiers by King Louis XIV in 1670.) The National Catholic Register described the [...]
From the editor’s desk As we were ready to go to press, Norman Podhoretz died. He was one of the three most important conservative intellectuals of the American conservative movement of the second half of the 20th century alongside William F. Buckley, founder of National Review, and Irving Kristol, with whom Podhoretz is a founding godfather of neoconservatism. Neoconservatism has come into [...]
6. Alberta protects kids, women from transgender ideology Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has shown leadership in not only requiring parents be notified when their children want to socially transition to the opposite sex at school by using a different name or pronoun, ban minors from receiving hormones that stunt their natural growth, and protect women from competing against imposter “transgender” women, she [...]
Paul Tuns, Review: After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People by Dean Spears and Michael Geruso (Simon & Schuster, $39.99, 307 pages) Concerns about rapidly declining fertility rates are mostly expressed by those on the right-end of the political spectrum. Pro-natalism is unfairly conflated with ideas of Christian nationalist and right-wing populism in political discourse even though the prospect [...]
From the editor’s desk: From the editor's desk On pages 14 and 15 of this issue we have book reviews of three giants of mid-20th century conservatism: William F. Buckley, Frank S. Meyer, and James Burnham. All three were at the founding of National Review, a magazine that has shaped U.S. conservatism since its founding 70 Novembers ago in 1955. [...]
Paul Tuns: On Sept. 25, Statistics Canada reported data that showed the country’s official fertility rate is 1.25 children per woman, the lowest figure Canada has ever recorded, down from its previous low of 1.26 children in 2023. The figures for 2024, the latest year for which data is available, provide data for births and stillbirths. In total numbers, there were 368,928 [...]
Paul Tuns: After the League of Nations disintegrated in the wake of World War II, U.S. President Frank Delano Roosevelt proposed the idea of the Four Powers (the U.S., U.K., Russia, and Red China) as an international body to coordinate cooperation among them. Throughout the war the idea morphed into what became the April 1945 San Francisco United Nations Conference on International [...]
From the editor's desk One of the necessary ingredients to reversing tanking fertility rates is restoring the vaunted place of motherhood and one way to do that is to make life easier for moms and families. Katherine Boyle, general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, tweeted some policy ideas on how to accomplish this: “Here’s some super easy things states [...]
Birthrates in developed countries around the world are low. They have been low for a long time. And, despite the ideologically driven propaganda of climate alarmists—who peddled the lie of a looming-but-never-detonating “population bomb”—the catastrophic effects of a population implosion are in these countries, already beginning to emerge. While an influx of migrants has partially concealed the decline, such misguided policies can [...]
Korean fertility rate craters to 0.75 Paul Tuns: Three recent news stories, a UN report, and a new study illustrate the challenge of precipitously declining fertility rates. Demographers consider a fertility rate of 2.1 -- the expected number of children a woman of childbearing age will have – as necessary to sustain a country’s population. Most western countries and large economies now [...]
Paul Tuns, Review: No One Left: Why the World Needs Children by Paul Morland (Forum, $32, 264 pages) Despite a growing number of countries experiencing rapidly declining fertility rates and falling natural population growth (that is, growth without immigration), there are still policymakers and thought leaders that insist that population growth is a problem. Paul Morland has been banging the drum on depopulation [...]
By J.M. Glover: ‘The incomparable gift of being born’ Mike Johnson, the Republican Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, gave his personal testimony at the 2025 March for Life in Washington, D.C. His words bear repeating from a man who was conceived by a teenage boy and girl. “I was born in January 1972 … I was the product of an [...]
Immigration responsible for nearly all population growth Paul Tuns: Source: Statistics Canada On Sept. 25, Statistics Canada reported that Canada’s fertility rate has been declining for 15 years and reached the new low of 1.26 children per woman in 2023. Demographers consider 2.1 children to be the natural replacement rate. The number of live births in Canada was unchanged at [...]