I like Vox. It could use a little more editing to get word lengths down, but they often run interesting pieces with plenty of detail and backup data.
However, they are also the online home of wokeness—and sometimes it's just too heavy-handed to ignore. Today, for example, I was reading a lengthy piece about falling global fertility rates and the success of government programs to turn this trend around. (Short answer: nothing works.) Then, right after describing a program in Taiwan, this comes out of the blue:
In the US, meanwhile, rhetoric aimed at getting people to have more children can ring hollow given a racist history in which white motherhood has been lauded while Black women’s fertility has been viewed as disordered and suspect, to the point that Black women have been forcibly sterilized. In a country where Black women die in childbirth at nearly three times the rate of white women, it’s impossible to hear calls to increase the birth rate without questioning who they’re really aimed at.
People sometimes ask for a definition of woke. This is it. It's great to be awake to the way society treats Black people and other minority groups unfairly. It's not great to try and shoehorn this in as an explanation for absolutely everything. It's stuff like this that gives woke a bad reputation, even among many non-conservatives.
POSTSCRIPT: For what it's worth, on the issue of maternal mortality the evidence suggests pretty strongly that the high rate of death among Black mothers isn't due to racism. The real reason remains a mystery, but a best guess is that it has to do with circulatory problems that are more widespread among the Black population than either the white or Hispanic population.
To quote Kevin Drum:
"That said, there are shockingly few rigorous studies trying to tease out the causes of this disparity [between maternal mortality rate among black mothers and everyone else]. "
In the US, a high black maternal mortality rate is not a national health crisis.
For many, the definition of "woke" is simply acknowledging that racism is a pervasive problem.
Yeah, this entire post is basically just a grumpy old man pretending not to be a white moderate.
OK, I'll bite.
If its "impossible to tell" then who, exactly, is it aimed at?
I don't know if I would go for "wokeness" rather than astonishingly poor paragraph structure.
Surely this paragraph does not mean that a call for increased birth rate is secretly a call for increasing black pregnancy death rate?
Talk about impossible. Kevin, I'd go with "absurd."
All right. Kevin, Kevin, Kevin! You were really looking for this one. The next sentences are:
"Black women have always understood, “You’re not talking about me when you’re saying these things,” said Regina Davis Moss, president of the nonprofit In Our Own Voice: National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda. Indeed, college-educated Black women in the US have fewer children than their white counterparts, with researchers speculating that concerns about maternal mortality could be a reason why."
So this is right after Kevin's quote. When Moss says "these things" -- she is referring to calls for more fertility. Its not "too woke" to suggest that there is a concern not only of not enough children, but for a large segment of our population, not enough WHITE children. And, that it already follows that we have enough non white children. Sheesh. Its not only not woke, its practically an official plank in the Republican platform.
I could have written it better, but how much more clear could Vox have been?
I am waiting for a really good definition of too wokeness, but this isn't it.
And by the by, having read the entire article, the overall theme is "its harder to encourage birth rate than one would expect" - and then article cites (prior to the pull quote Kevin got out of it) many examples of stuff which did not work.
Then, this particular paragraph, essentially is about why this might now work in the US. One reason is suggested that in the US there really is a not so secret public policy against a higher birth rate for African Americans.
I mean, "woke" are you kidding , the campaign against (black) welfare abusers (by having more kids and getting more $) is open, blatant, notorious, and explicit.
Again, this part could have been written better, but I think Kevin was so busy looking for excess wokeness he was like the proverbial man with a hammer to which every problem looks like a nail. If you will.
Presuming your assertions on black infant mortality are right (which I have no idea about but didn't find the linked post very convincing) your conclusion is still wrong. Obscure articles on liberal wonk blogs are not what "gives woke a bad reputation". Republican propoganda is.
It doesnt seem ridiculous that some people in the US who come from very different backgrounds than Kevin Drum might have a different view than he does on calls for increased births.
Kevin doesnt really have to worry about racial disparities in maternal mortality, but I guess those black women at increased risk should take comfort in the fact that while we cant explain it, we can write off racism.
Nothing to see here, move along and have more babies. Good luck with the unexplainable mortality problem. I feel good knowing it isnt racism that might lead to your death and please stop bothering us all with your wokiness! Thanks!
I beg to differ.
As a resident of Wokeville, Oregon the full range of left-activist policy is on display. And the execution of those policies is what gives "woke" a bad reputation. If they actually accomplished their goals that would be great! But no, they dissolve into a miasma of feelings, intersections, identities, oppression and NOTHING happens. THIS is what the conservative half of the country rightly seizes on.
The campaign slogans are great ... but you gotta execute.
If conservative voters want ineffective government, surely they should vote for the "left-activists" who can't actually execute their agendas, and not the right-winger who is promising to put illegal immigrants in "camps" and have his former advisors executed for "treason" because they said he's unfit for office.
Surely what you promise to "execute" is at least as important as whether you manage to do so? Especially given that "end racism" is considerably harder than "spend $15 billion of Defense Department appropriations building 458 miles of border wall."
"Especially given that 'end racism' is considerably harder than 'spend $15 billion of Defense Department appropriations building 458 miles of border wall.'"
Except the wall didn't get built, either. And the woke got marriage equality, a majority of states with legalized pot, reduced incarcerations of minorities, environmental justice in urban areas removing lead water lines and reducing trash and chemical burns, investing more than $15B in urban infrastructure, etc.
You ever notice that you cited zero things, RacistPDXdad?
Hi Crissa! Always so great to have your considered, incisive and deeply informed comments. I'm still in awe about your conclusions from 8th grade science classes.
Yeah, I didn't give any cites b/c this thread isn't about the local politics of Portland and most readers won't have the context to evaluate them anyway. But you can do a quick search for Portland homeless crisis, Multnomah County homeless office excess budget, Portland Affordable Housing, Portland Drug Crisis & Measure 110, Portland District Attorney election. Oh, and how Oregon no longer requires high school students to actually be proficient in English or Math because that would be racist apparently. Happy to talk dets once you're up to speed.
While "woke" seems to originally refer to racism, the tar brush is applied broadly to all things lefty - and that dysfunction is best seen in one branch of government handing out tents to our homeless while another branch confiscates them. That's some powerful effectiveness there!
Political opponents will always find some drum to beat - but why make it so easy with gross failures of implementation? And perhaps more to the point ... why the assumption that "woke has a bad rep" is only a Republican thing? Nah, its also a centrist thing.
"And the execution of those policies is what gives 'woke' a bad reputation. If they actually accomplished their goals that would be great! But no, they dissolve into a miasma of feelings, intersections, identities, oppression and NOTHING happens."
This could easily describe Republicans and MAGA as well. For 40 years trickle down has been a failure, every GOP president since Nixon ended his term in a recession, GOP-led states have worse health, education, income and other basic outcomes, and Trump never built the wall, ended Obamacare, had an infrastructure bill, or had any signature accomplishment except cutting taxes on rich people to expand the deficit and continue the failed trickle down effort.
And then you look at MAGA who are the ultimate snowflakes and refuse to believe they lost elections, can't handle criticism, ignore facts and scientific results, and whine that everyone is out to get them. Talk about a miasma of feelings!
Yet liberals are judged on results, and MAGA/GOP are judged on crowd sizes.
"Obscure articles on liberal wonk blogs are not what 'gives woke a bad reputation'. Republican propoganda is"
Even worse than Republican propaganda is center=left commentators who internalize the Republican propaganda and then repeat it in their own way. The center-left "You know, the fascists really do have a point" give cover to the fascists.
re your highlighted portion of the quote:
apparently your position is that black motherhood is promoted and cherished to the same degree as white motherhood?
i'd really really like to see your data on that
as a counterfactual, lots of republican politicians aren't exactly shy about discussing replacement theory
data point:
Approximately 700 women die annually in the United States as a result of pregnancy or its complications; racial/ethnic disparities exist.
Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Pregnancy-Related Deaths — United States, 2007–2016
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/68/wr/mm6835a3.htm
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that 50,000 women in the United States (U.S.) suffer from pregnancy complications annually, but that Black women are at least three times more likely to die due to a pregnancy-related cause when compared to White women [1,2]. The estimated maternal mortality rate in 2019 was 20.1 and, in 2020, was 23.8 per 100,000 births which represents about 861 maternal deaths. For Black women, that rate is about 55.3 per 100,000 live births, representing an estimated 1800 maternal deaths, the highest amongst any racial group; this is a number that has continued to increase over the past few years [3,4]. While each mortality or morbidity circumstance is different, the leading causal factors associated with maternal mortality and morbidity in the U.S. include hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, thrombotic pulmonary embolism, hemorrhage, infection, cardiovascular conditions, cardiomyopathy, and non-cardiovascular medical conditions [5]. While predisposition to underlying health conditions such as hypertension, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and obesity plays a role in racial disparities in pregnancy-related deaths and other adverse pregnancy outcomes, when these medical conditions are not present, racial disparities persist.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9914526/
that conclusion looking specifically at cardiovascular conditions was from a 2023 paper
Healthcare (Basel). 2023 Feb; 11(3): 438.
While predisposition to underlying health conditions such as hypertension, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and obesity plays a role in racial disparities in pregnancy-related deaths and other adverse pregnancy outcomes, when these medical conditions are not present, racial disparities persist.
Is it actually a "pre-disposition" or is it a result of a combination of the food deserts in which so many People of Color live and the "southern-fried" African-American cultural diet?
Pre-Disposition. The stats hold true for poor and wealthy women of color, for women with poor diets and middle class/wealthy women of color who eat healthy. If you are descended from US Slaves from African countries, you are at higher risk for hypertension and other pregnancy complications.
The quoted text is unobjectionable and absolutely true, both in its quoted form and in its original context. That Drum finds it to be a problem of some sort says more about him than Vox.
Exactly, Murc.
So who in the United States initiates discussions about the need for greater fertility? Are there any limitations or reservations in their recommendations?
I think Vox stipulates the answers are known and the questions unnecessary.
It's a poorly written paragraph. I'm not sure how woke it is or how irrelevant to a discussion on birth rates.
In the US, there is a certain amount of anxiety over low white birth rates. There's also anxiety over high non-white birth rates. The reason is because of racism: white births are valued more here. It makes it challenging to discuss birth rates without acknowledging race. Are you really pushing for more babies across the board, or are you pushing specifically for more white babies?
The issue of maternal mortality is pretty unrelated to the issue. It should have been left out because it just muddles the author's point. No one thinks anyone wants to increase the birth rate just to kill more Black women.
Did Drum forget all about "Replacement theory," where White nationalists insist that the liberal plan is to eliminate whiteness by getting all these fertile non-whites to out-baby the White people?
One of the older Trump fans at my job had been encouraging the young white co-workers to have more babies in order to “save” the white race. He stopped doing that when one of the young men came out as trans. Shucks darn it! They’re everywhere!
Lebensborn sounds like just the ticket!
It's not unrelated to mothers. Higher maternal mortality reduces overall population growth, as it means mother who want to have children die. That historically it was offset by overall size of families doesn't mean it's not a net negative.
I don't have any anxiety of "low birth reates" for Euro-Americans. What I have anxiety about is that SOME Euro-Americans are still having "stair-step" families, and the ones that are are the American Taliban with their "Quiverfull" women.
If the religio-fascists out-breed the sane people for fifty years, what you see now is what you get.
I was finally going to have a working definition and then I read the post and I’m more confused than ever. On maternal mortality rates, the discrepancy between blacks and whites appears disparate enough that my guess is (like it is often) there are multiple reasons.
The term "woke" as used by the right is a reference to anything tending to cause or associated with the end of White Christian Supremacy.
Since most on the right are not yet willing to admit to racism, this fundamental connection is not referred to by them. And since the media don't want to offend the right - they depend on business for advertising and on Republicans to read or watch them - they avoid the connection also. This is why you do not see the above definition in the media. The common statement that "woke" doesn't mean anything is false. It's just that the actual meaning can't be said out loud in the media or most politics.
The right is not really getting offended by many of the specific items that they complain about - these items are references to the real and very important matter of tribal dominance. As I keep saying, this matter arouses fundamental instincts and can be more important than life itself, and it takes precedence over rationality.
^This^
People who are subtle racists accuse people of being "woke" for seeing the racism (Uncle Ben's Rice for example)
Hard agree.
It’s why I don’t read Vox like I used to. Sometimes good faith efforts to solve a problem get waylaid in the discourse by litigating past sins. If it helps us understand the present, fine. But declining birth rates are a global phenomenon.
Declining birth rates are indeed a global phenomenon. Solutions, however, are specific to nations. In our country, any discussion of addressing fertility must examine the reasons for disparate outcomes by race. Is that "litigating past sins?"
Naah, the solution is the same everywhere: raise taxes and subsidize children more. The $4000 tax credit I get for my two children covers approximately health care, and that’s it ($100 x 26 pays increased premium, $1500 for co-pays and deductible).
Declining birth rates ARE a solution.
Why does there need to be a "solution"????? Fewer babies mean less stress on habitat, fewer gigatons of GHG's released, and less degradation of the agricultural lands we have.
Less babies is a GOOD thing! And ESPECIALLY, "less babies in America" where every child born has a Carbon footprint bigger than fifty Africans.
I'm sure that higher infant mortality among Black women has NOTHING to do with environmental pollution in majority-Black communities.
You've lost the lead thread, KD.
Independent of whether or not his conclusions are correct, Kevin is referring to maternal mortality, not infant mortality.
I'm sure that higher infant mortality among Black women has NOTHING to do with environmental pollution in majority-Black communities.You've lost the lead thread, KD.
Your comment is nonsensical. Nowhere does Kevin indicate environmental pollution has no bearing on maternal mortality, which, of course, is the issue at hand (not infant mortality).
"The real reason remains a mystery, but a best guess is that it has to do with circulatory problems that are more widespread among the Black population than either the white or Hispanic population."
While there are certainly some prevalence differences in some medical conditions, many of those are the direct result of racial disparities that lead to those differences. Also, there's plenty of evidence of actual racial bias in treatment of the patient, where black patients, including mothers to be, are given poorer care in the form of underprescibing medication when actually needed, or dismissing patient complaints and concerns compared to white patients.
many of those are the direct result of racial disparities that lead to those differences.
Cite?
FWIW that would be my gut instinct, too, but my gut instinct isn't science and this problem has been studied pretty exhaustively. The thing is, there are pretty strong class disparities that affect Hispanics and poor whites, and yet we still see proportionally more serious issues in this area among Black women.
Scientific American from earlier this year on the issue. Note that disparity of care along racial lines is one of the explanations offered. Does that make Scientific American as woke as Vox?
I am more than certain that implicit bias has a big influence in how medical care is delivered. But I also suspect food deserts and the limited number of doctors taking Medicaid patients are also large factors -- both of which reflect issues stemming from historical, embedded racism in the American system.
You're White. Maybe this isn't the kind of issue you should be staking a claim on with an authoritative opinion.
RE Medicaid, good luck getting that in most Southern states, where governors refused to accept the federally funded Medicaid expansion several years back.
Note that disparity of care along racial lines is one of the explanations offered. Does that make Scientific American as woke as Vox?
The tone of the Vox blurb clearly implicates conscious, pernicious anti-Black racial animus in the provision of maternal care ("given a racist history in which white motherhood has been lauded while Black women’s fertility has been viewed as disordered and suspect, to the point that Black women have been forcibly sterilized..."). Kevin has investigated such accusations in depth, and finds them lacking in evidence. And as far as I know he has never claimed "racial disparities" play zero role in maternal mortality. Quite the opposite, in fact:
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/05/maternal-mortality/
You're White. Maybe this isn't the kind of issue you should be staking a claim on with an authoritative opinion.
Maybe you should do 30 seconds of poking around the internet before you engage in yet another one of your smugly stupid accusations of this blog's author.
If you read the Scientific American article, it's clear there are many experts who have concluded that the disparity is partially race-based.
I said nothing about Vox. I addressed the issue at the core of the disparity that KD disputed was race-based.
I guess you didn't read it or my comment carefully. What's your excuse?
Also, I tire of the personal attacks. Quit it.
Wokenes is a serious problem for the Left. And yet, as best I can tell, it remains relatively rare for Liberals to even attempt to acknowledge, let alone critique, wokeness in any way.
In some "progressive" spheres, wokeness is now explicitly enforced. California's Community Colleges have put regulations into effect mandating that any professors who fail to practice and teach antiracism may not get tenure (in other words, they'll be fired).
So, full props to Kevin. Any Liberals who push back on wokeness, to whatever extent, deserve full praise for their efforts. And that brings us to the Vox article and Kevin's response to it.
I think John McWhorter (among others) more or less described the essence of woke by referring to it as a religion. I would add that it's pretty obviously a fundamentalist religion. Here's the wiki page on Fundamentalism; it's characterized by: "the application of a strict literal interpretation to scriptures, dogmas, or ideologies, along with a strong belief in the importance of distinguishing one's ingroup and outgroup, which leads to an emphasis on some conception of purity". And that is an exact description of the modern Left.
So, I would basically describe the comments above from Vox as religious assertions. They are part of a dogmatic creed that a modern fundamentalist sect not only believes in but insists on enforcing. And if you refuse to convert, there are large and powerful institutions (such as the Califonia Community College system referenced above) that will treat you like a heretic and excommunicate you.
It may bear mentioning that not all religious assertions are without value or insight. Kevin appears to be referencing this point when he says that it's fine to be aware of the problems that the woke movement tries to highlight.
But there's a difference between the kind of justice and charity sought by a fundamentalist church and that pursued by a secular organization like the Red Cross. The church pursues its efforts with the hope if not, in some cases, the outright demand of converting you. And if you ultimately accept the charity but decline the conversion, they will more or less, implicitly or explicitly, condemn you to hell. The Red Cross, on the other hand, just helps you. No strings attached.
So, yes, the woke may have social justice in mind, but it's a fire and brimstone form of social justice that won't hesitate to destroy you in the name of their righteous cause. And I personally would prefer to pursue a form of justice without any of those strings attached.
You really seem to care about the HR policies of the California Community College system.
They aren't HR problems; that's a mischaracterization of the issue. The regulations involve compelled speech, viewpoint discrimination, and an administrative control of the curriculum.
And that situation should be one of the biggest scandals in the country right now. It's the first case I know of where a "progressive" establishment just went ahead and explicitly acknowledged that their employees will now be fired for questioning Wokeness.
So why isn't that a bigger story? I suspect the reason is that the employees at so many other "progressive" establishments (such as media outlets, publishing houses, nonprofits, etc.) fear for their livelihoods if they question what's happening in California.
Censorship can only be questioned if it's practiced by a Republican like DeSantis in a red state like Florida. But when censorship is explicitly, publicly, loudly, and unambiguously embraced and enforced by the woke (and allowed by a Democratic governor like Newsom), that's too risky to report on.
That being said, I know of one and only one article by a major news outlet calling out the problems in CA. The Atlantic Mag published one article on the topic: "A Uniquely Terrible New DEI Policy - At stake: the First Amendment rights and academic freedom of 61,000 professors who teach 1.9 million students"
But once this story finally got some mainstream coverage, why didn't anyone else pick it up and run with it? Again, I suspect the problem involves too much of a Leftist monoculture throughout most media outlets.
The only ones who regularly write on the legitimate and frightening problems in CA colleges are either at Right Wing news outlets or on Substack. And that probably has the perverse effect, otherwise known as the Fox News Fallacy, of convincing the Left that the problem can be ignored.
Dude, if you're a racist, you shouldn't be working at a publicly funded school.
Nobody said anything about being racist. The issue was "antiracism". There's a lot of space between not being racist and preaching "antiracism".
"And that situation should be one of the biggest scandals in the country right now."
Only in your diseased mind.
+1
Yep - Leo1008 brings the good stuff every time.
Thanks for the laugh....
I notice you say it's a problem but then...
...you're upset that racists aren't promoted?
This is not a matter of wokeness being a problem, Racism is bad, yo,
My wife and I are white. She certainly had some sub-standard medical experiences during her pregnancies decades ago. In the running for worst: She showed up at her obstetrician's office with bleeding and was shoved into a room. Two hours later she emerged wrapped in a blood soaked sheet and asked when someone was going to see her. They had her walk across the parking lot to the hospital emergency room to ask for a D&C.
The idea that, on average, black women don't see worse treatment than white women seems ludicrous to me. We may wish that even unconscious racism has disappeared, but clearly it hasn't. There's just no debate to be had.
If black women got 99% of the quality of nearly impeccable care given to white women, you wouldn't see it in the statistics. Instead they get something like 80% of the quality of the much less than great care white women get. That's enough to make the statistics.
One last thing: Why are some people so fixated on birth rates? What we need in the US and the world is a declining population. If it doesn't go down we will kill off all the interesting wildlife. If it doesn't go down we will end up with overwhelming poverty and endless dictatorship.
The arguments that we have to have an ever growing population is an invention of the people determined to protect the very rich from ever paying any damn taxes.
Thanks for your point on overpopulation. We need less fertility, not more. Unless, of course, people really want more refugees, resource wars, water shortages, famine, disease, deforestation, soil erosion, boat people, etc. This will certainly happen if the population continues expanding as it has over the past three generations. In 1951 world population was 2,543,130,380. Now it is about 8,045,311,447 (according to the Worldometer website). The population of Earth has more than tripled in my lifetime. Things are going to get ugly, and insects, rats, skunks, racoons, and coyotes will inherit the earth.
+1
The idea that, on average, black women don't see worse treatment than white women seems ludicrous to me.
It seems ludicrous to me, too. Who, exactly, is making such a claim?
Kevin did. He claimed that physiological differences between blacks and whites/hispanics were a "best guess" as to the cause of the worse maternal death rate.
If that example is just "in the running for worst", I'd love to hear your other stories because that is abominable.
Gah...
Whenever you hear an older white guy start in on "woke," you know it's time to skip the rest of the article.
Looook, you could be here talking about facts, what they show or don't, talk about sources of data and what you think, etc. but when you're starting from a place of "all this damned WOKE!" it's clear that's not why you're here, you've just signaled your bias, and that you're trying to argue something based on your emotions, not facts. (well that and relegating the actual facts you want to talk about to a link).
You wanna know what's actually everywhere? Anti-"woke" griping from white people.
Whenever you hear an older white guy start in on "woke," you know it's time to skip the rest of the article.
Points for honestly admitting you don't bother to even read what you're responding to.
I read Kevin's post and one of my current tells that I'm dealing with someone with bias is whining about woke. Sure as sugar these are the same folks who used to whine to me privately back in the 1990s that some of my Black co-workers were lazy good for nothings. Some folks weren't a lost cause though, I could point out counters to their broad brush and get them thinking that people are people some good some not so good. Others sadly you knew were stuck in old times and were never going to evolve.
It's ironic, so many of the reactions from our more progressive posters against Kevin's article further illustrate the very things that Kevin was talking about and has talked about in the past in regard to wokeness --- the intolerance of disagreement, the name calling, the obsessive framing of EVERYTHING as redolent of some injustice whether it is or not.
It makes it hard to be a normie liberal with allies like the progressives.
+1
It's ironic, so many of the reactions from our more progressive posters against Kevin's article
Most pernicious of all is the clear tendency to jump to indigent typing before reading in detail.
Folks, Kevin is not claiming racial disparities play zero role in maternal care, and he has indeed done substantial work in this area:
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/05/maternal-mortality/
It's "SDS" -- "Students for a 'Democratic' [NOT] Society" -- from the '60's back with it's grimace of sadism.
Who DID bring about 18 Brumaire?????
+1
What seems odd about the addition of historical information in the article is that it asserts racism as a cause of current decreased fertility, but does not actually connect the two.
Racism in America is not new. Crediting racism with reducing fertility over the last 15 years seems strange to me. Maybe there is some sort of statistical evidence that would back up the argument, but the article does not give it. Were Black women unconcerned about their higher death rates 20 years ago? Did they just realize there was a discrepancy? Neither seems plausible to me. The article also does not claim that the reduction in fertility is concentrated in "Black birthing bodies" (the term the article uses), which is what you'd expect if the impact of racism was a major factor in reduced fertility.
I don't have a problem with pointing out historical racism, but I think it risks missing or distorting actual trends going on now. I see this often in articles. Honestly, it seems more lazy than woke. It's easier to point out historical racism than it is to discover how current disparities are being created by recent decisions and practices. It also just creates bad analysis that risk turning off readers who can see the flaws.
For another example, a recent local news article highlighted how more drivers are fleeing police. The police noted that the rise in fleeing vehicles was greatest among White drivers. The end of the article included a statement from an academic saying that BIPOC drivers were likely fleeing more due to the history of police violence against non-Whites. But the actual evidence suggests something else is the major cause of the increase right now!
It's the crap that the Anarcho-Capitalists of the food industry ram down our guts daily. Many of those poly-syllabic chemicals are SERIOUS hormone disrupters. I believe that it's the basis for the explosion in Gender Fluidity; male and female hormones are out of whack and "normal" sexual development goes a little bit haywire.
The Agro Corps that Republicans fellate every five years in the "Ag Bill" are the root cause of the "Gaying of America" [ed note: NOT "Graying"] which so freaks out the Biblio-Nationalists.
Why would any sane government want to discourage birth rates from declining?
A woke article would have encouraged immigration policies. Worried you don't have enough young people to make stuff for your old people? Encourage 18 year olds to get a university education in your country, promising citizenship after graduation.
JFC, Kevin. Just, wow.
If there is one country in the world that shouldn't have to worry about declining birth rates, it is the USA. We have millions of people dying (some literally) to get in.
Only people who are concerned about a decline in the rate of native born babies (and, particularly, white Americans) need be concerned that we'll have enough people to do the work of the next generation.
But, wait, Kevin says AI will take all the jobs anyway, so no problem.