Due to Covid panic at least 56,000 Japanese babies won't be born
This is happening everywhere, not just in Japan.
The pandemic is having a major negative effect on birthrates, especially in the developed world, and those birthrates were in free fall anyway thanks to the effects of feminism and encouraging women to pursue collectively pointless careers.
The latest news is the Covid pandemic is now directly crashing birthrates in Japan. As reported by Nikkei Asia:
Based on the number of reported pregnancies and other data, Takumi Fujinami of the Japan Research Institute estimates annual births at 848,000 this year and 792,000 in 2021, just a third of the levels seen during the postwar baby boom. The most recent projection by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, in 2017, had shown the tally crossing the 800,000 threshold 12 years later.The trend threatens to put further pressure on the already-shrinking working-age population that supports the country's social safety net.Aiwa Hospital in Saitama Prefecture normally handles more than 2,500 births a year. But it saw a roughly 5% drop between April and November in first-time patients coming in for pregnancy confirmations and other services, compared with the same period a year earlier, and has around 20% fewer deliveries scheduled for January and February 2021 than in the first two months of 2020 -- almost unprecedented declines.The National Center for Child Health and Development also sees a slump in scheduled deliveries over the first two months of 2021, and a sluggish recovery from March on. "There are probably people who are hesitating to have children due to uncertainty, economic and otherwise, about the future," said Haruhiko Sago, a senior official at the center.The slump in pregnancies shows up in official data. Health Ministry statistics announced Thursday show a 5.1% decline on the year in reported pregnancies for the first 10 months of 2020, with a 17.6% plunge in May, the month after the government declared a state of emergency. Virus hot spots experienced particularly steep drop-offs between April and October -- 9.1% in Tokyo, 8.1% in Hokkaido and 7.6% in Osaka.
Japan's fertility rate (births per women) already looks like this:
As you can see, it is extremely low. In the last 20 years it has fluctuated between slightly over 1.4 children per woman at the highest and slightly below 1.3 children per woman at the lowest. But both of these rates are extinction rates.
At 1.3 every generation becomes one third smaller than the previous one. At 1.4 it becomes 30% smaller. What is needed, of course, is a birthrate of over 2 just to maintain a steady population.
If the early data we are getting is showing a 5% decline in the number of pregnancies, then current figure of 1.369 children per woman will plummet to 1.3 again.
Only the most radical measures can save societies like Japan and those in the West which have exactly the same problem. Strangely few governments are doing anything about this. Instead they are being hysterical about a new kind of flu that mainly harvests a few very old and sick people, who have already lived their best years. What about all the kids that will never even get a chance to be born? One unborn baby with 80 or 90 years ahead of him is a much greater loss than a hundred old and sick people in their 80s. Cruel as that sounds, that is just a fact. This is the BIGGEST unacknowledged political issue of our day.
