A Bit More Detail

Over the past week, I've come across some interesting news reports about different trends in different parts of the world. I have assembled them in a links post at Demography Matters.

• The Independent noted that the length and severity of the Greek economic crisis means that, for many younger Greeks, the chance to have a family the size they wanted--or the chance to have a family at all--is passing. The Korea Herald, meanwhile, noted that the fertility rate in South Korea likely dipped below 1 child per woman, surely a record low for any nation-state (although some Chinese provinces, to be fair, have seen similar dips).


• The South China Morning Post argued that Hong Kong, facing rapid population aging, should try to keep its elderly employed. Similar arguments were made over at Bloomberg with regards to the United States, although the American demographic situation is rather less dramatic than Hong Kong's.


• Canadian news source Global News noted that, thanks to international migration, the population of the Atlantic Canadian province of Nova Scotia actually experienced net growth. OBC Transeuropa, meanwhile, observed that despite growing emigration from Croatia to richer European Union member-states like Germany and Ireland, labour shortages are drawing substantial numbers of workers not only from the former Yugoslavia but from further afield.


• At Open Democracy, Oliver Haynes speaking about Brexit argued strongly against assuming simple demographic change will lead to shifts of political opinion. People still need to be convinced.


• Open Democracy's Carmen Aguilera, meanwhile, noted that far-right Spanish political party Vox is now making Eurabian arguments, suggesting that Muslim immigrants are but the vanguard of a broader Muslim invasion.

Dina Fine Maron's Scientific American article concerning new technologies that could marry DNA from three individuals, creating three-parent children, is a good overview of the technology's position in the United States right now. (I'm for it, for whatever it's worth, in that preventing inherited mitochondrial DNA diseases in children is a good thing.)

Scientists have already had successes with this type of reproductive approach in monkeys and in human embryos, and are now eager to launch human clinical trials. First, however, they must get the green light from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which will convene a public hearing before an advisory committee on February 25.

The technology, called oocyte modification (but sometimes nicknamed “three-parent IVF”), involves scooping out potentially mutated mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from a woman’s egg and replacing it with the mtDNA of an unaffected donor woman. The process is designed to prevent the transmission of some debilitating inherited mitochondrial diseases, which can result in vision loss, seizures and other maladies. Such inherited diseases, often unfortunately known by acronyms for complex medical names that include LHON, for Leber's Hereditary Optic Neuropathy, along with MELAS, MERRF and NARP, occur in about one in every 5,000 live births and are incurable.

Once the mtDNA has been swapped out, the egg could be fertilized in the lab by the father’s sperm and the embryo would be implanted back into mom where pregnancy would proceed. The resulting child would be the genetic offspring of the intended mother but would carry healthy mitochondrial genes from the donor.

[. . .]

Scientists already have evidence for the promise of this type of oocyte modification. Shoukhrat Mitalipov of the Oregon Health & Science University and his colleagues created human embryos in this way, although they did not implant those embryos to make babies. Their findings were published in October 2012 in Nature. Other work from that same team also found that in monkeys the process could lead to the birth of healthy offspring that remained free of complications into adulthood. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group).

[. . .]

But wading into this type of approach is also fraught with ethical issues. Marcy Darnovsky, executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society, fears that this reproductive approach could soon lead to tampering with other traits, such as intelligence or sports ability. “Life is full of slippery slopes and we need brakes,” she says. “This is described as saving lives but it is not aimed at people who are sick,” she adds. The FDA advisory committee does not plan to consider ethical issues at this meeting. Instead it will focus on the scientific aspects of future clinical trial considerations, including long-term risk of carryover of abnormal mtDNA, the potential benefits and harm to mothers and future children, and the need for multigenerational follow-up in any trials (because female children could pass on mitochondrial disease to future offspring). “Our job will be purely to air the issue and bring it out into the open,” says Evan Snyder, chair of the committee and director of the Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology Program at Sanford–Burnham Medical Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif. “We’re not going to come out at the end of the meeting and say we are advocating for clinical trials or any particular technique. This is educational,” he says.

Over at Demography Matters, I point--thanks to Will Baird--to a 2012 TED talk by the Gapminder Foundation's Hans Rosling, examining the question of the relationship between religion and fertility.

I've a post up at Demography Matters linking to a post by The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer that took a look at the actual subsidies, mentioned in passing in the recent post on Singaporean population policy. Briefly, even the various financial incentives offered by the Singaporean government--heavily subsidized fertility treatments, baby bonuses and tax incentives, child care subsidies--aren't that significant relative to the costs of parenthood.

Here's a few links to demographics-related news stories I thought readers might be interested in.



Eurasianet, via Inter Press Service, features an article describing how many children in Kyrgyzstan have been left effective orphans by the migration of their parents, for work purposes, to Russia and Kazakhstan. I've read of similar phenomena elsewhere in the world, for instance in other post-Soviet republics like Armenia and Moldova.



The Guardian carried the news that Polish, on account of the past decade of immigration, is the second most common language by number of speakers in England, with the half-million Polish ranking just behind Welsh-speakers in total numbers.



On a related note, The Telegraph reports that not only have 3.6 million Britons emigrated in the decade 2001-2011, just under two million were people in the 25-44 age group, i.e. not retirees looking for the good life in France or Spain.



The Washington Post takes note of the fact that in Ireland, the ongoing post-boom recession is made relatively tolerable only by the resumption of large-scale emigration.



A recent OECD report points out that the German labour market hasn't been taking up large numbers of immigrant recently, tracing the problems to a regulatory system that's seen more as administering a ban on migrant workers with exceptions than one that enables migration, particularly for non-highly skilled workers, as well as the relatively small number of potential migrants fluent in Germany.



The Vancouver Observer notes that while Iran has a substantial population of talented computer engineers and software designers, by and large they can only exercise their talents outside of their country.



The South China Morning Post's Tom Holland writes, from a Hong Kong perspective, about how Singapore's total population and GDP may have surpassed Hong Kong's thanks to the former's liberal immigration policies, but notes that Hong Kong still has an advantage in GDP per capita. A Straits Times article, meanwhile, notes that the Singaporean government hopes to boost TFRs up to the 1.4-1.5 child per woman level, by a quarter.



The Hankoryeh notes that fertility in South Korea has risen somewhat in recent years, the TFR rising from an all-tie low of 1.08 in 2005 to 1.3 last year.



The Global Post has a photo essay depicting Chinese workers making their annual migration back to their home communities for the Lunar New Year festival.



On the subject of islands, growing migration from New Zealand (mainly to Australia, Bermuda (to the United States and Australia) and Puerto Rico (to the United States, increasingly to Florida) has been note in the press.



Al Monitor and Reuters both note the pronatalism of Erdogan in Turkey, who is trying to prevent Turkey's fertility rate from falling below the replacement level through a combination of financial incentives and public lectures.

(Crossposted at Demography Matters here.)

Over at Demography Matters I've a post up taking a look on the ongoing debate as to whether or not, and to what extent, the Ontario government will pay for fertility treatments.