Birth Rates

Japan, which designates every May 5 as Children's Day, had fewer children to celebrate the holiday for the 28th straight year, underscoring a demographic shift that could eventually wreak havoc on the world's second-largest economy. A government report released this week says the number of children younger than 15 as of April 1 had fallen to about 17 million. Japan's proportion of children -- which has been declining for 35 years -- now stands at just 13% of the country's 128 million people.

Europe appears to be losing faith in its own future, Pope Benedict XVI said, warning against "dangerous individualism" on a continent where many people are having fewer children. "One must unfortunately note that Europe seems to be going down a road which could lead it to take its leave from history," the pontiff told bishops in Rome for ceremonies to mark the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome, a major step toward the creation of the European Union.

Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, widely touted as a way to help older women undergoing in vitro fertilization achieve a higher birth rate, actually reduces births by a third, Dutch researchers reported Wednesday. The finding represents a major setback for the procedure, which involves removing a single cell from a 3-day-old embryo to look for potential birth defects.

Political leaders vowed to push through policies to encourage Germans to have more children after new data showed declining birth rates. The Federal Statistics Office said that fewer than 700,000 children were born in Germany in 2005, the lowest total since 1946. Another study placed it bottom in rankings of births per citizen.

Europe is buying more coffins than cribs. The continent faces a shrinking population and other harsh demographic changes that threaten the welfare state unless it finds more foreign workers in coming decades. But its economic need for newcomers is at odds with its skepticism of embracing an angry and often disillusioned immigrant Muslim population.

When Kim and Brian Sevin were temporarily displaced to Florida in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, there was little else to do but sit around, watch the news and find comfort in each other's arms. That's when baby Cameron Casey was conceived. "She is a Katrina evacuation baby," said Kim Sevin, 35, of the infant who was born a little prematurely on May 29, exactly nine months after the storm. "It was absolutely a blessing, but it was not planned, not expected."

China's one-child-per-family policy has cut the country's birth rate, with males clearly outnumbering females there, according to a study in the British Medical Journal. Using data from nearly 40,000 women, it found the birth rate had dropped from 2.9 before the policy was introduced in 1979 to 1.94 in women older than 35 and 1.73 in women younger than 35. It also concluded that the male-to-female imbalance has risen from 1.11 in 1980-89 to 1.23 in 1996-2001.

Children are scarce in Germany, but not in this farming region of slaughterhouses and churches, where stores close before sunset and there's a baptism every weekend. Some credit tradition, some God. Some say it's the return of Germans whose families were trapped in the Soviet bloc after World War II. A bit of all these things has made this town the nation's baby machine. But even Cloppenburg's higher-than-average fertility rate will barely sustain its population in coming decades.

Welcome to Kstinovo, population one. Antonina Makarova, 78, spends her days watching news and soap operas in her peeling wooden dacha, the only inhabited structure in two lanes of sagging cottages that once were a village. Her nearest neighbor, 80-year-old Maria Belkova, lives in adjacent Sosnovitsy, population two. But she can't hear anymore, and all in all, Makarova finds the television better company. "All the houses here were filled with people. There was a cheese factory.

The Caesarean delivery rate for U.S. women hit a record high in 2005 while teen births fell to a new low, government health officials said Tuesday. Close to a third of all babies born in the United States -- 30.2% in 2005, up from 29.1% in 2004 -- were delivered surgically in a procedure also commonly called a C-section, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics.