A plague is spreading silently across the globe. The young generation in America, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Japan, Australia – in virtually every western country -- is afflicted by rapidly increasing rates of infertility.
This spring, the United States reported its lowest birth rate in 30 years, despite an economic boom. Finland’s birth rate plummeted to a low not seen in 150 years. Russian President Vladimir Putin recently introduced a string of reforms aimed at stemming the country’s “deep demographic declines.” The government of Denmark introduced an ad campaign to encourage couples to “Do it for Denmark” and conceive on vacations, and Poland produced a campaign urging its citizens to “breed like rabbits.”
The “population bomb” we were all endlessly warned about by environmentalists failed to blow, and instead, demographers have been trying to raise the alarm about the population implosion crisis unfolding across the West -- the graying of societies facing an unprecedented aging demographic in which there will be too few young to support the old. Most often, they blame social factors: young women embracing careers instead of motherhood, men shunning marriage and fatherhood, rising consumerism or couples choosing to delay raising a family until the economy settles.
But there is another phenomenon that is rarely mentioned – the growing numbers of young people who are not childless by choice but who are incapable of bearing children.
So, earlier this month, when an unprecedented study was released that looked at a database of more than eight million American women and singled out a whopping 25 percent increase in childlessness associated with one particular vaccine that young women have been taking for only a decade -- in tandem with a marked decline in fecundity -- you would have thought there would be significant interest from public health, the medical profession and the media, wouldn’t you?
