Canada's population has topped the 37-million mark, but Newfoundland and Labrador wasn't any help, according to numbers released by Statistics Canada on Thursday.
The province was the only one where the population dropped in the first three months of 2018 — by 0.3 per cent to just under 526,000.
China's young adults are moving to the city and making more money. They're pickier about their marriage prospects and that has China's government worried about a rapidly decreasing marriage rate.
NOEL KING, HOST:
Record numbers of Chinese people are moving to cities, and record numbers of them are also deciding to hold off on getting married. The marriage rate in China has plunged by 30 percent in the past five years, and this is making the Chinese government very worried. NPR's Rob Schmitz has the story.
ROB SCHMITZ, BYLINE: At a market in Shanghai, people are hustling to sell their goods. And at this market inside People's Park, their goods are their grown children.
(Speaking Chinese).
MRS. WANG: (Speaking Chinese).
SCHMITZ: Mrs. Wang is lined up among hundreds of other parents all standing behind umbrellas with signs taped to them advertising their unmarried children. We read hers together.
(Speaking Chinese).
MRS. WANG: (Speaking Chinese).
SCHMITZ: Born in 1985, studied in the U.K., short, has a Shanghai residence permit, owns her own apartment. Wang has come to Shanghai's marriage market each weekend for the past three months to try and find a suitable husband for her daughter.
MRS. WANG: (Through interpreter) She doesn't agree with what I'm doing, but she respects her parents' wishes. Young people these days don't care about marriage. They don't pay enough attention to our traditional values. Their views are becoming more Western.
SCHMITZ: Wang blames her daughter's single status at the age of 33 on the seven years she spent in the U.K., where she became more independent. But there are other reasons why young Chinese aren't rushing into marriage. Thirty-year-old Dai Xuan, who works as the editor of a luxury magazine in Shanghai, says hers are economic.
DAI XUAN: (Through interpreter) Bizarre in China, you married to survive. Now I'm living all by myself so I have higher expectations in marriage.
SCHMITZ: Like many young urban Chinese, Dai studied abroad. She lived in Norway, and she enjoys her job. She says she's not in a rush to get married.
DAI: (Through interpreter) People my age laugh at those who get married early because only rural people without an education do that. It's not that successful women don't want to marry. It's that making money makes us pickier.
SCHMITZ: But that can work both ways, says Josephine Pan. The 45-year-old is the Shanghai CEO of FCB, an advertising firm. She says in a traditional society like China's, men are intimidated by her title.
JOSEPHINE PAN: They don't want a female CEO as a girlfriend or wife. They maybe feel it's a big threat to them. I'm not an arrogant person, like, all the time show off my title. I keep it very low-profile. But, no matter how low you keep, you're intimidating them.
SCHMITZ: While men outnumber women among China's overall population, at Chinese universities women have outnumbered men for the past two decades. And that means more women who have career trajectories they don't want to jeopardize by marrying and having children.
LETA HONG FINCHER: What's happening on the ground with these particularly urban, educated women is completely at odds with what the Chinese government wants the women to be doing.
SCHMITZ: Leta Hong Fincher is the author of the forthcoming book, "Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening In China." She says China's Communist Party has tried propaganda campaigns, matchmaking events and has even ended the decades-old one-child policy to persuade educated young women to marry and start families. But declining birth rates show none of this is working. The party's problem boils down to this. Projections show by 2030 there will be more Chinese over the age of 65 than under 14. For the first time in a century, China will be facing a shortage of workers and an oversupply of non-working seniors, an economic problem that Hong Fincher says will become a political one.
HONG FINCHER: It relates to, ultimately, to the survival of the Communist Party. How do they continue exerting control when you have all these chaotic forces - young people, young women in particular, who are all wanting to do their own thing rather than follow the dictates of the government and marry early and have babies?
SCHMITZ: And it's not only women who are opting to forgo marriage. Twenty-six-year-old Yuan Ruiyu says he and his friends are under pressure from both the government and their parents to hurry up and marry, and it's having the opposite effect on them. He says it's making them question why they should marry in the first place.
YUAN RUIYU: (Through interpreter) In China, young people are supposed to do as they're told by their parents and their government. But it's a trap. It's not for our own good, but for theirs.
SCHMITZ: Yuan says as more and more of his peers leave their hometowns, study abroad and find jobs they like, they become more and more independent. And marriage, one of the most personal decisions someone can make, becomes their decision, not anyone else's. Rob Schmitz, NPR News, Shanghai.
According to a recent study by the University of Southern California, scientists now believe that best age to have a baby and give birth is after the age of 35, as it improves the mental abilities of the mother.
Are You at Risk of Having a Baby With Down Syndrome?There is one key risk factor for Down syndrome: maternal age. A 25-year-old woman has a 1 in 1,200 chance of having a baby with Down syndrome; by 35, the risk has increased to 1 in 350; by age 40, to 1 in 100; and by 49, it's 1 in 10, according to the National Down Syndrome Society.
Severe birth complications more common with older mothersWomen who are at least 35 years old when they give birth are much more likely than younger mothers to experience a variety of major pregnancy complications. Research has linked what’s known as advanced maternal age to problems like high blood pressure and diabetes during pregnancy and a higher risk of death and severe complications for babies.
Women 35 and older were also eight times more likely to have amniotic fluid enter their bloodstream, a complication that can cause a life-threatening allergic reaction. Mothers 40 and older were almost 16 times more likely to have kidney failure and almost three times more likely to have obstetric shock, when organs don’t get enough blood and oxygen. These women were also almost five times more likely to either have complications from interventions done to help deliver the baby or be admitted to intensive care units. The findings add to evidence linking advanced maternal age to a higher risk of problems for mothers and babies.
Age related detection and false positive rates when screening for Down's syndromeAt 15 years of age the detection rate was 77% at a 1.9% false positive rate, 84% at a 4% false positive rate at age 30, rising to 100% at a 67% false positive rate at age 49.
dohboi wrote:No problem. Make abortions of defective kids the norm, and that problem goes away.
I come from a family of doctors many generations back, so I know that it was common practice for doctors to quietly dispose of malformed or defective newborns and just tell the mother that it 'died at birth.' These kinds of 'kind cruelty' are of course not allowed any more. But we now can detect most of these conditions quite early and abort accordingly.
Here, as with much else, rights to abortion and other women's rights are key to reducing and reversing population growth.
Anyone who is deeply concerned about population is either also a radical feminist, or an idiot (or worse).
My claimed risks? You think I am making this up doiboi? I thought you came from a family of doctors? Do you really not know about the health risks of older mothers? If that is the case, I recommend you do some reading on this topic. Here are a few links to get you started:dohboi wrote:Give women educations and rights and most will not want to have kids at 15 and would far prefer to put off child bearing till into their late twenties or thirties, regardless of your claimed risks.
The Mayo Clinic: Pregnancy after 35: Healthy moms, healthy babies* The risk of pregnancy loss is higher.
* The risk of chromosome abnormalities is higher.
* You might need a C-section.
* You're more likely to develop gestational diabetes.
* You're more likely to develop high blood pressure during pregnancy.
* You're more likely to have a low birth weight baby and a premature birth.
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