Demography Archives - The Interim

Pro-family prime minister Viktor Orban defeated in Hungary’s national election

Paul Tuns: After 16 years in power, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party were roundly defeated by the centre-right Péter Magyar. Orbán promoted family values, encouraged larger families through fiscal policy tax cuts and family benefits, and defended Hungary’s national sovereignty from invasive immigration and the European Union. With tax advantages and handouts, Hungary under Orbán saw its fertility rate [...]

admin2026-05-07T18:37:22-04:00May 7, 2026|Abortion, Demography, Marriage and Family, Politics|

Canada, U.S., hit record low fertility rates

Paul Tuns: In April, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released statistics that show the United States had its lowest ever recorded fertility rate, with just 1.57 births per woman of child-bearing age. Demographers say that a birth rate of 2.1 is necessary to maintain a stable population over time without immigration or emigration. There was a total of 3.6 [...]

admin2026-05-06T11:18:15-04:00May 6, 2026|Demography|

‘There are real medical consequences’: maternity care deficit in Canada, US

Tanis Cortens, Feature Writer: Over the past year, six Canadian hospitals have experienced decreases in maternity care availability. Peace Arch Hospital in White Rock, B.C., has a maternity diversion in place as of this writing: Expectant mothers will have to deliver their babies at other hospitals between March 12 and 18, marking the ward’s eighth temporary closure since December. Also in B.C., Ridge [...]

admin2026-04-17T08:08:23-04:00April 17, 2026|Bioethics, Demography, Society & Culture|

Your death was Paul Ehrlich’s dream

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 [...]

admin2026-04-01T10:25:03-04:00April 1, 2026|Demography, Rick McGinnis|

And then there was this, March 2026

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 [...]

admin2026-03-27T14:22:43-04:00March 27, 2026|Abortion, Demography, Marriage and Family|

Deaths: of neocons, of manners, of childbearing

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 [...]

admin2026-01-29T10:25:25-05:00January 29, 2026|Abortion, Demography, Paul Tuns, Society & Culture|

A liberal lament for depopulation

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 [...]

admin2025-12-03T13:10:57-05:00December 3, 2025|Abortion, Demography, Reviews|

The birth of American conservatism, ‘born this way,’ etc…

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. [...]

admin2025-11-18T14:13:01-05:00November 18, 2025|Bioethics, Demography, Euthanasia, Marriage and Family, Paul Tuns, Politics|

The number of Canadian births continues to tank

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 [...]

admin2025-11-04T16:46:01-05:00November 4, 2025|Demography|

UN timeline

admin2025-10-06T11:08:14-04:00October 6, 2025|Abortion, Demography, Marriage and Family, Politics|

The United Nations: 60 years of pushing abortion, family planning

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 [...]

admin2025-10-06T11:36:05-04:00October 6, 2025|Abortion, Demography, Marriage and Family, Politics|

Observations, comments, and quotes

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 [...]

admin2025-09-29T19:01:23-04:00September 29, 2025|Demography, Euthanasia, Marriage and Family, Paul Tuns, Politics, Religion|

Why Johnny and Ginny can’t breed

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 [...]

admin2025-09-03T09:39:51-04:00September 3, 2025|Demography|

Fertility rates diving in major economies

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 [...]

admin2025-09-03T09:35:39-04:00September 3, 2025|Demography|