"The foreign-born population of the United States numbered 31.1 million in 2000, according to Census 2000 results released today. This represents a 57 percent increase over 1990 and the continuation of an upward trend that began in the 1970s.  ...The proportion of foreign-born over the 30-year span increased from 4.7 percent in 1970 to 11.1 percent in 2000."

(Source: United States Census Bureau, United States Department of Commerce News, "Number of Foreign-Born Up 57 Percent Since 1990, According to Census 2000," June 04, 2002, http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/2002/cb02cn117.html.)

"Can America import virtue?  The truth is that our marriage and fertility numbers in the 1980s and 1990s-weak as they are-have already been pumped up by the 'family values' of new Latin American and Asian immigrants.  ...Unless we recover our own commitment to stronger homes built on economically sound and child-rich marriages, the United States will probably join the list of nations in demographic decay well before the next great census of 2100."

(Source: Allan C. Carlson, "The American Century," The American Enterprise, vol. 13, no. 3, April/May 2002.)

Even as global fertility and childbearing drops worldwide, the "offspring sex ratio" continues to decline significantly.  That is, while we are having fewer babies per mother, even less and less of those children who are born are boys.

One theory as to this reduction suggests that "chronic exposure to toxic environmental agents" could lead to a lower male to female ration, as these agents "predominantly affect males and the male reproductive system."  The authors of this new study document that the offspring sex ratio declined after exposure to dioxin and also to methylmercury.  Furthermore, stress seems to play some role, as the ratio declined in the wake of the Kobe earthquake, as well.

In this study, researchers from Japan and Denmark endeavour to examine what effect, if any, parental smoking has on the sex ratio.  While previous studies have shown that maternal smoking during pregnancy had no effect on the sex ratio, here the effect of periconceptional smoking-smoking around the time of conception-is examined, specifically, "from 3 months before the last menstruation to when the pregnancy was confirmed."

The authors found that periconceptional smoking did significantly alter the sex ratio: "The sex ratio was 1.214 (1975:1627) in the group in which neither mother or father smoked, whereas the lowest sex ratio of 0.823 (255:310) was seen in the group in which both mother and father smoked more than 20 cigarettes per day (odds ratio 0.68 [95% CI 0.57-0.81]; p<0.0001)."  Lest one think that this is merely another deleterious effect of maternal smoking, couples where the mother was a non-smoker, but the father smoked more than 20 cigarettes daily also "displayed a significant decline": 0.984 (odds ratio 0.81 [95% CI 0.74-0.88]; p<0.0001).

The reality is, that irrespective of whether, or how much, their spouses smoked, both fathers and mothers who smoked more than 20 cigarettes per day begat a significant decline in the offspring sex ratio: 0.967 for smoking fathers vs. 1.200 for non-smoking fathers (p<0.0001); and 0.830 for mothers who smoked in excess of 20 cigarettes per day, vs. 1.063 for non-smoking moms (p<0.002).

It has been known for years that there exist negative effects upon children whose mothers smoke while pregnant, but now, it seems that parental smoking-both mothers' and fathers'-has ill effects even at the earliest of stages-the very conception of the child.  Perhaps smoking is feminism's ultimate weapon to rid the world of men.

(Source: Misao Fukuda, Kiyomi Fukuda, Takashi Shimizu, Claus Yding Andersen, and Anne Grete Byskov, "Parental Periconceptional smoking and male:female ratio of newborn infants," The Lancet, vol. 359, April 20, 2002, p. 1407-1408.)