One of the scary trends we follow here at Vital Signs Blog is the "Birth Dearth" facing Europe and other countries in the world. In fact, I posted an entry just a couple of days about the issue with links to recent stories highlighting the respective crises in Japan and Germany.The Telegraph (U.K.) has just published an interesting article about how Germany's new Chancellor (who, by the way, has no children) is making the drastic "birth dearth" in her country a key issue. Here's an excerpt...
Chancellor Angela Merkel has pushed Germany's low birth rate to the top of the political agenda for the first time since the Nazi era as an expert said the nation could die out if the trend continued.
A third of German women are not having children, a remarkable figure even compared with low birth rates in the rest of Europe. Among graduates the figure is as high as 40 per cent. Every year 100,000 more Germans die than are born and each generation is shrinking by about a third. Even in the poverty and despair after the Second World War, more babies were born than now. The figure has slumped to 1.3 children per woman, far short of the replacement rate of 2.1.
Some observers attribute the trend to young people's reluctance to sacrifice their comfortable way of life and leisure time to bring up the next generation...