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Those are some of the statistics outlined in Save the Children’s 14th annual State of the World’s Mothers report released this week.

“The birth of a child should be a time of wonder and celebration,” reads the introduction. “But for millions of mothers and babies in developing countries, it is a dance with death.”

There is, however, a glimmer of hope. The number of children dying has declined by more than half since 1970. Latin American countries, especially, have seen declining newborn and maternal death rates. And that’s not some miracle. There are very specific measures that have kept babies alive.

Some of the solutions are simple. It’s important to clean umbilical cords to avoid infection, for example, and to give vaccines. Vitamin supplements and breastfeeding can also save lives. Countries that have done a good job of teaching these things to healthcare workers and then supported them with government funding have seen death rates drop.

Save the Children estimates that more than a million babies could be saved each year if they and their mothers had access to steroid injections to prevent preterm labor, resuscitation to save babies who are not breathing at birth, an antiseptic to clean umbilical cords to avoid infections, and injectable antibiotics to treat newborn sepsis and pneumonia. The most expensive of these measures is just $6.

Of the 12 developing countries making the greatest strides, Peru and Brazil rank at the top. Mexico comes in fifth, and Guatemala ranks eighth. Brazil has reduced newborn mortality by more than 60 percent since 1990 and narrowed the healthcare gap between the rich and poor. It provides free care to mothers and deploys healthcare workers to some of the poorest areas. Nearly all births are now attended by a skilled healthcare provider. Breastfeeding and immunizations have increased.

But it takes governments, nonprofits and citizens all working together to make such solutions a reality. There are daunting obstacles, from abject poverty to pure gender discrimination, that hamper their implementation.

One way to get to the root of the problem is education of parents. Less educated women are more likely to be poor and mothers living in poverty are most at risk of giving birth to babies who don’t make it. Educated women marry and begin having children later. They are more likely to be financially stable, well-nourished and healthy. Educating boys and men about family planning and maternal health is also critical.

Maternal and newborn death rates are highest in sub-Saharan Africa where poverty is rampant and life-saving measures like anti-malarial nets are scarce. The top countries are in Scandinavia, where universal healthcare is a reality and there is less of an income gap.

The United States has the highest first-day death rate in the industrialized world. More than 11,000 babies in this country die on the day they are born, which is 50 percent more first-day deaths than in all other industrialized countries combined. One reason is that the U.S. has a high preterm birth rate. It also has more teenagers giving birth than any other industrialized country. Babies born to teens are more likely to be premature and weigh less. The solutions involve everything from keeping young women in school longer to making sure every mom and baby has access to healthcare.

It is not an easy thing to solve. But as Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, wrote in the report’s foreword, “Saving newborn lives will prevent incalculable suffering.”

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It saddens me to see articles like this one, especially when I know quite a few men who used to be Boy Scouts who are now ashamed of their participation in such a judgmental organization. I’m sure these outspoken Boy Scout supporters are not helping garner public support for the organization’s intolerant ways:

The Boy Scouts of America announced on Friday that it’s recommending admitting gay youth — but not adults. So far there’s been no explanation for why adults shouldn’t be allowed.

But right-wing pundits have for a long time lobbed heinous anti-gay allegations that contend gay adults are likely pedophiles. Keep reading to find six of the most egregious statements made recently by wing-nuts trying to defend the BSA’s anti-gay policy, including designated hate group Family Research Council, a former governor, and several religious leaders.

Of course, numerous studies have demonstrated that pedophiles are more likely to be heterosexual than gay — one study from Canada, published on the U.S. National Library of Medicine through the National Institutes of Health, found that among convicted sex offenders, the ratio of those identifying as heterosexual compared to homosexual was 11:1.

Tony Perkins

The president of the anti-gay Family Research Council was wrong when he told CNN’s Soledad O’Brien today that his organization has never equated homosexuality and pedophilia. Perkins is obviously speaking from both sides of his mouth, since he has in fact made that connection countless times in recent years. Just this morning, Perkins’s FRC ran a full-page ad in USA Today that claimed the BSA’s ban on gay members “is part of the BSA’s efforts to protect Scouts from sexual abuse.” The ad went on to cite the organization’s so-called Perversion Files, an internal blacklist that FRC’s ad says contains the names of “hundreds of sexual predators who had managed to hide their attraction to boys and enter the Boy Scouts.”

Pat Robertson

Appearing on the Christian Broadcasting Network, conservative televangelist Pat Robertson said that if the BSA lifts its ban on gay scouts, we will see “predators as Boy Scouts, [and] pedophiles who will come in as scoutmasters,” according to LGBT blog The New Civil Rights Movement.  Robertson also said that Congress and the “politically correct crowd” shouldn’t be “fiddling with the Boy Scouts.”

Mike Huckabee

While supporting the Boy Scouts’ decision not to allow gay troop leaders and scouts, Fox News commentator Mike Huckabee equated gay people with child molesters last July. The former Arkansas governor and failed presidential candidate was reacting to a caller’s story of being abused by a scout leader while serving as a Boy Scout.

“You make us all understand why the Boy Scouts made a decision that at least I think was the right one,” he told the caller.

“Tim” said he had been repeatedly abused and offered a theory on what caused it. “I believe homosexuals try to target groups like that to get a leadership area in,” the caller said. “If there hadn’t been a homosexual in my troop, I wouldn’t have been traumatized for about three years.”

Huckabee shared that the leader of his own childhood scout troop had molested other boys. “We didn’t even know what a homosexual was in those days,” he said.

Richard Land

Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention appeared on CNN Tuesday to allege that gay scoutmasters might be pedophiles while still saying that wasn’t his point. Despite CNN anchor John Berman’s note that as a Cub Scout, his pack had den mothers who were obviously members of the opposite sex, Land continued to attempt to distort the truth.

“Homosexuals by definition are attracted to people of the same sex,” said Land. “Now, I’m not accusing homosexuals of being pedophiles. But I’m accusing homosexuals of being what they say they are — attracted to males.”

“Do parents really want to allow their teenage boys to go on camp-outs with men who are attracted to the same sex?” Land continued. “They wouldn’t let their girls go on camp-outs with men who are attracted to women. This verges on being beyond the realm of the rational. … This is going to lead to human tragedy, and the human tragedy is going to be, sadly, boys and men that are going to end up in relationships that are going to be tragic.”

Bryan Fischer

Bryan Fischer, a right-wing radio host and director of issues analysis for the anti-gay American Family Association, didn’t bother with subtlety or tact when he weighed in about the BSA’s ban on Twitter last month.

A homosexual does not belong in the same tent with young boys any more than a man belongs in a tent full of Girl Scouts.

Fischer has a long history of virulently anti-gay remarks, including calling gay people Nazis, saying that AIDS is caused not by HIV but rather by gay sex and drugs, and issuing calls to recriminalize consensual sex between adults of the same gender.

Linda Harvey

Conservative radio pundit and president of the anti-gay, anti-choice Christian organization Mission: America, railed against not only gay scoutmasters, but gay scouts themselves, saying they present a serious threat to straight scouts.

“It’s about more than the adults in charge and potential abuse,” Harvey wrote in a column for right-wing site WorldNetDaily last month. “The kids themselves bring a whole new threat level, mostly to other kids.”

Lest anyone be confused about the specifics of that “threat,” Harvey continues. “First, there’s the long-standing concern about pedophilia,” writes Harvey in her January 29 column. “This new policy introduces homosexual attraction into the troop environment where previously sex separation kept that complication out of the character development of these young men. If homosexual identity is allowed, you also open the door to same-sex flirting, innuendo, ‘dating.’ What about the 25-year-old homosexual Scout leader and a 14-year-old Scout? What about the 14-year-old Scout and a 12-year-old? What about two openly homosexual adult leaders who display their attraction for each other in front of all the boys? And so on. And with males, attraction quickly goes to the sexual level. But now, that’s OK.”

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If the Supreme Court can find its way through a dense procedural thicket, and confront the constitutionality of the federal law that defined marriage as limited to a man and a woman, that law may be gone, after a seventeen-year existence. That was the overriding impression after just under two hours of argument Wednesday on the fate of the Defense of Marriage Act.

That would happen, it appeared, primarily because Justice Anthony M. Kennedy seemed persuaded that the federal law intruded too deeply into the power of the states to regulate marriage, and that the federal definition cannot prevail. The only barrier to such a ruling, it appeared, was the chance – an outside one, though — that the Court majority might conclude that there is no live case before it at this point.

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The Westboro Baptist Church is about to get a big surprise in the form of a new neighbor who plans to give the notoriously anti-gay group a taste of its own medicine.

Aaron Jackson, one of the founders of Planting Peace, a multi-pronged charity that has in the past concentrated on rainforest conservation, opening orphanages and deworming programs, bought a house that sits directly across from the church’s compound six months ago. On Tuesday, March 19, he and a team of volunteers are painting it to match the gay pride flag.

The project — which the nonprofit is calling the “Equality House” — is the first in a new campaign Planting Peace plans to wage against the group. Westboro is known for its intimidating tactics of protesting (or threatening to protest) what they refer to as America’s pro-gay, anti-God agenda, in close proximity to pride parades, soldier funerals and other events like the Sandy Hook memorial services.

“I read a story about Josef Miles, a 10-year-old kid who counter-protested the Westboro Baptist Church by holding the sign that says ‘God Hates No One,’” Jackson told The Huffington Post.

“I didn’t know anything about the church or where they were located, but that story kept popping up. And one night I wondered, Where is this church? I got on Google Earth, and I was ‘walking down the road,’ and I did a 360 view. And I saw a ‘For Sale’ sign sitting in the front yard of a house. Right away it hit me, Oh my gosh, I could buy a house in front of the WBC! And immediately I thought: And I’m going to paint that thing the color of the pride flag.”

Jackson said he’s always wanted to get involved in gay activism, but hadn’t been sure of how to do it until this opportunity presented itself.

“The reason I haven’t gotten into the gay rights activism is because, in a sense, it’s almost silly — it’s 2013, are we really still in this position? It just seems ludicrous,” he said. “But it is a real issue and kids are killing themselves. I’ve wanted to do something, and I knew when I saw that house for sale that it all came together. Everyone who knows me knows that I’m a little crazy and there’s no red tape in my charity. When I want to do something, I do it.”

Planting Peace bought the house for roughly $83,000, and Jackson has been living in Topeka for just over a month. As he waited for the perfect time to transform the house into a very visible celebration of gay pride — and a direct challenge to what Westboro preaches — he encountered members of the group, including the Phelps family, which has run the church since it was established in 1956.

“They own the majority of the homes in the community, and I walk through the area every day, and I see them running in between each other’s houses,” he said. “One day I was walking, and Shirley Phelps [one of Westboro's main spokespeople and the daughter of the church's leader, Fred Phelps] was on her four-wheeler. And I said, ‘Hey guys, how are you?’ And [she and her husband] responded, ‘Oh, we’re good. How are you?’ We had a short conversation, and she was extremely nice, and she made a joke and we all laughed.”

“It’s the craziest thing — and it really throws you off — because she’s the type of woman who calls you “hun” and “darling” — she’s very Southern,” he said. “It’s like, aren’t you the lady that’s supposed to be casting me into hell? It’s truly mind-boggling, but I can’t say anything personally bad about her because she was kind to me and she made me laugh. She’d probably be fun to hang out with.”

But pleasantries aside, Jackson said he’s confident that the church is already wary of his presence and may be expecting some sort of action from him.

“They’re extremely smart, and I would be willing to guess that when I moved into this community that they looked up property records, especially considering that I drive a Prius and I have an original reelect Jimmy Carter sticker on the back of it — I’m a screaming liberal,” he said.

Jackson said he’s also witnessed members of the church taking photos of the house and the industrial flagpole he installed, which stands in opposition to the flagpole that currently flies the pride flag and the American flag upside-down in front of the Westboro Baptist Church.

“It looks like the United Nations is having a stand off with flags. These flag poles are huge. They know that we’ve forked out big money for this,” Jackson said.

Jackson said he’s seen people who he thinks are members of the church, including high-ranking member Steve Drain, taking photos of the house.

By the end of Tuesday, the Westboro Baptist Church will no longer be wondering what is going on at Jackson’s home. But beyond painting the Equality House the colors of the rainbow flag and flying the flag from the newly installed flagpole, Jackson is already working on the next steps in his new fight for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LBGT) equality.

“We want this house to be a message that where there’s hate, there’s also love. But we also want to raise awareness and capital, and we want to put all that money into creating and sustaining anti-bullying programs, along with supporting anti-bullying programs that already exist,” he said. “Beyond the symbolic message of the home, [the house] will be utilized by volunteers to live here, and these volunteers will work on promoting equality anywhere in the world and managing these anti-bullying initiatives that we plan on creating.”

While Jackson understands that Westboro feeds off of the attention that it receives from the media and others, he said he believes that it’s still critical to address their hate.

“The media has already given them such a huge platform, and I don’t see that stopping,” he said. “We’re taking the energy that’s being poured into them and turning it into something positive. This is how we plan on playing it: Use their energy and let’s turn it into something incredibly positive for the LGBT community.”

Jackson said he also sees the Equality House as one more step toward bringing about the demise of the organization. In recent months, the group has faced a backlash both from former members — like Lauren Drain, who released a book about her life in the church and who recently suggested that Westboro’s leader, Fred Phelps, may himself be gay — and city governments, which have passed legislation aimed at limiting the group’s ability to picket.

“I think the future for the Westboro Baptist Church is very bleak,” he said. “These poor kids will hopefully continue to leave that church. They have a lot of kids over there, but unfortunately they’re not in a place where they can make decisions for themselves.”

Jackson is confident that Westboro’s loss of power and relevance is just one sign of the good things still to come for the LGBT community.

“I love seeing all of these Republicans and all these people who have been anti-gay all this time jumping ship because they know they’re on the wrong side of history. It’s an amazing thing to see,” he said. “I know we have a long way to go in fighting bigotry, but we all know the gays are going to win. It’s going to happen.”

To find out how you can help support the Equality House and its anti-bullying campaign, click here.

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On October 3 The United Nations held an unaccountably cheery media event at its New York headquarters, to mark the occasion of the world’s population passing seven billion.

It was a statistically questionable exercise, for it acknowledged that no one could be sure of the planet’s exact population on any given day. The UN called it “symbolic”.

The question is why, if they were going to celebrate any major demographic development with such faux-certainty, did the powers that be at the UN not make it the really important one, the one which gives some hope for this overcrowded planet.

I mean this one: half the population of the world now lives in countries where those of childbearing age are having fewer than two children on average.

That’s a development so significant that it’s worth saying again, in a different way. The fertility rate of half the world is below replacement level.

We can’t be sure exactly when the world reached this tipping point, any more than we can be sure exactly what the total population is, but the UN stats indicate it came a little after we reached the seven billion. If we wanted to be “symbolic” we could say it happened today.

Pregnant Indian women at a maternity ward in Nawanshahr. By mid-century India will be the world’s most-populous country.

The precise date is unimportant. What is important is that we are now exactly in the middle of perhaps the greatest demographic change in recorded history. Human numbers have grown almost uninterrupted — other than during for a couple of brief downturns occasioned by disasters such as the black plague — for thousands of years.

Biology and the scriptures urged us to be fruitful and to multiply. Now, quite suddenly in relative terms, half the people of the world have decided not to multiply.

This is not to say population has peaked. Half the world is still reproducing at more than replacement rate, and there is a lag of about 30 years, or one generation, between the time that fertility falls and the time population does.

What has peaked is the rate of population growth. It took just 12.5 years for the world’s population to grow from four to five billion, 11.8 years for it to grow from five to six, but it has taken almost 13 years to grow to seven billion.

And birth rates across most of the world are falling far more quickly than predicted even a few years ago.

The way things are going, it’s entirely possible that in little more than a generation world population will stop growing, and that our children will live to see a planet with many millions, maybe a billion, fewer people on it than there are now.

They could see a world where labour moves as freely as capital, as was the case until the 20th century. They could also see new social tensions, fostered by politicians exploiting racist attitudes. They could see mass unemployment, if our economic system fails to adapt to a low-growth world. Or they could see a world in which fewer people all get a bigger share.

What our children will experience depends on how we handle an unprecedented demographic shift that is literally changing the complexion of the world, darkening its features as the relative numbers of Europeans and east Asians decline and the numbers of south Asians and Africans increase.

Changing ethnicity is the least of it really, as you’ll shortly see.

Biology and the scriptures urged us to be fruitful and to multiply. Now, quite suddenly in relative terms, half the people of the world have decided not to multiply.

First, though, let’s look at what has already happened, and how.

In order for a society to keep its population stable, each woman needs to produce an average of 2.1 children. Demographers call this statistic – the average number of births per woman – the Total Fertility Rate. The population of any society which has a TFR of below 2.1 for any length of time will begin to shrink (assuming, of course, that the numbers are not made up through migration). It will also get older on average.

Much of the western world has had fertility rates below the magic 2.1 level for more than a generation and, as a result, it has begun to shrink and/or age.

Take Italy, for example.

When the next Pope moves into the Vatican, he will move to the epicentre of the failure of his church’s authority. Despite Catholicism’s opposition to fertility control, Italians have taken to it in a big way, and there just aren’t a lot of little Catholic babies being born anymore in Italy, which is now one of least fertile nations in Europe.

Italy’s total fertility rate falls way short of that 2.1 replacement level. Over the five years to 2010 it was just 1.38. As a result, Italy now is also among the oldest nations on Earth, with a median age of 43.2. This places it among a handful of countries which have only three working-age people for each older, retired person.

But Italy is by no means unique among nations, or even an extreme example of an ageing population. Europe as a whole has been reproducing below replacement rate since the mid-1970s. Between 2005 and 2010, according to UN figures, the continent’s fertility rate was just 1.53.

As a result, the only thing preventing Europe from shrinking is immigration. The same applies to Australia and almost all the rest of the developed world. Unless these countries can find a way to get their citizens to make more babies again — which, as the Pope and policy-makers know, is very hard to do — the only solution is to import people from the less developed world.

The xenophobes might not like it, but without it, the future is Japan.

Like Europe, Japan’s fertility rate has been below replacement level since the mid-1970s. But unlike Europe, Japan has almost no immigration.

Given that there is a lag of about 30 years, one generation, between the time a country’s reproductive rate falls below replacement level and the time it begins to decline, Japan’s population now is falling. And the rate of decline is increasing sharply.

By the turn of the century, according to the UN’s Population Division projections, Japan’s population will most likely fall by a quarter. And this projection may well be understating things. The current rate of reproduction would see Japan’s population more than halve, from around 125 million in 2010 to about 55 million in 2100.

And as we know, as birth rates decline in a country, the average age of its citizens increases. In 2010, the median age of the Japanese was 44.7. If it maintains its current low fertility rate, the median age will be 56 by 2050, and 60.4 by 2100.

If you want to understand why Japan’s economy has remained flat despite repeated efforts at economic stimulus over the past 20 years, and also predict the likely outcome of the latest huge effort at stimulus, taking a quick look at the country’s demographic profile is a good way to start.

Again, Japan is far from being the starkest example of low fertility. Eighteen other countries have lower rates of reproduction. The most extreme is Singapore, which is now one of the most crowded places on Earth, but which could be much emptier soon, unless its people lift their fertility rate from its current 0.78.

At that rate, without immigration, by 2100, three generations from now, Singapore’s population would be down more than 90 per cent, from the current 5.2 million to well under half a million, mostly geriatric, citizens.

Singapore is not Japan, however; it is importing people at a phenomenal rate. Forty per cent of its total population are non-citizens. The “non-resident” population grew 7.2 per cent in 2012 alone.

This is creating a backlash: “Singapore for the Singaporeans” is the slogan of protest. Community pressure recently forced the government to reduce the intake of foreigners. Even the official glossy government “population brief” says: “We recognise that new immigrants take time to integrate into our society, and taking in too many too quickly could weaken social cohesion.”

These words eerily echo former Australian prime minister John Howard, when he was warning about Asian immigration in 1988. Ironic that an Asian government now should be saying the same thing.

But before we go further into the consequences of declining population, let’s get back to the big global picture.

It should be noted that the UN still thinks it most likely that the world’s population will keep growing until about 2100, topping out at about 10 billion.

But that assumes a recovery in the fertility rate of many of the low-fertility countries, which to date has shown little sign of occurring. In fact, across much of Europe and in America the recession has sent birth rates plunging again. And many demographers believe it is likely the UN is also over-estimating the fertility of China.

Several well-respected forecasters think the population peak will come lower and sooner than this. The UN itself produces an alternative “low growth” model, which foresees global population peaking only about 30 years from now, at a little over eight billion, then declining fast to be about six billion by 2100.
It took just 12.5 years for the world’s population to grow from four to five billion, 11.8 years for it to grow from five to six, but it has taken almost 13 years to grow to seven billion.

An interesting recent exercise in number crunching, conducted by US economist David Merkel, using fertility data from the CIA World Factbook, concluded world population would peak even sooner, just 17 years from now, at 8.5 billion.

The reason there are many differing estimates is that there are so many variables involved in predicting population — not just birth rates but death rates, life expectancy and migration, and small variations in the assumptions used in the various models compound into large differences over time.

But the trend evidence is the same everywhere; fertility rates are coming down, and falling much faster than generally predicted only a few years ago.

This might seem a comforting development to those of us who grew up fearing the Malthusian nightmare presented in Paul Elrlich’s 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb, with its predictions of exponential population growth, environmental catastrophe and mass starvation.

However, the likely repercussions of this shift are more complex. For a start, environmental impact is not a function of population alone, but of population combined with consumption and technology.

And instead of one population problem, we now have two. In some parts of the world — the poorer parts, by and large — population continues to grow apace, while in others — Europe, East Asia, the Americas — there has been what many see as an over-correction. At one extreme is Niger, where the fertility rate is 7.16. At the other extreme, as we mentioned earlier, is Singapore, at 0.78, whose citizens appear intent on extinction.

No doubt the world’s population has to decline to be sustainable in the long term, says Peter McDonald, professor of demography at the Australian National University and president of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population. But it has to decline in an orderly way.

“Countries need to have a birth rate not too far from replacement level, somewhere in the 1.7 to 2.0 area. Once you drop below that, you cause too much damage to your age structure,” he says.

In other words, you have too many old people for the young people to support.

“If you have a birth rate of one,” he says, “that means your population falls by half in one generation, which is about 30 years. After three generations you’re down to one-eighth of your starting population. And one-sixteenth after four.

“If the Japanese keep their birthrate where it is they’ll quickly become extinct.”

“Equally, if you’re much above two and you’re a big country, you’re growing way too much.”

Let’s deal with overpopulation first, because the places in which it is concentrated, Africa and south Asia, will be as important to our future — maybe more important — than the declining nations of Europe and east Asia. Already Indians make up the biggest part of Australia’s skilled migration, for example.

Africa is going to be where the biggest action is in coming decades, because it is the place on Earth with the greatest untapped resources, both natural and human. It will have the greatest population growth into the future. It is what China was a generation ago, and could become what China is today — the economic powerhouse of the world.

Exaggeration? Consider this: in 2012, according to the International Monetary Fund, economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa was estimated at 6 per cent. Export growth was more than 30 per cent.

This was while Europe was mired in recession, the United States was staggering along and even China was slowing.

And guess which country is the biggest investor in Africa, and its largest trading partner? China. As in so many areas, from high-speed transport to renewable energy, China is proving more far-sighted — if not necessarily more benign — than western nations.

But Africa and south Asia have a big problem to overcome: too many people.

For most of human history, people had many children, because many children died. Agrarian or basic industrial economies also needed lots of labour. In addition, where there was no prospect of saving for retirement or getting a pension, your offspring were your safety net in old age. A big family is still seen as an advantage in societies characterised by high infant and maternal mortality, economic underdevelopment, inadequate infrastructure and poor education.

In more advanced economies, though, that advantage disappears. It goes instead to those who have fewer offspring and who put more resources into the education of those offspring — to those who do brain work and who save for their futures.

The keys to lowering fertility rates are pretty well agreed, too. The best things you can do are empower and educate women, provide access to family planning and foster secular institutions, stable government and economies.

Some places, notably China and India, have also employed coercive measures such as sterilisation campaigns and denial of benefits to those who have too many children. Apart from the unacceptability of such measures on human rights grounds, though, they have been of mixed success. China’s population has stopped growing (and is about to begin to shrink quickly), in part due to 32 years of the one-child policy, and in part due to the changing demographic realities of a developing economy.

India’s population still is growing quickly, but its fertility rate has declined sharply.

Ready access to birth control has changed the developing world, mostly for the economic better, although there have been some problems along the way. In some countries, a preference for male offspring has led to selective termination of pregnancies, which brings its own problems. In some Indian cities, for example, there are only 800 women for every 1000 men, an imbalance seen as a contributing factor to general social instability, violence and sex crimes.

Overall, though, policies directed at lowering fertility have wrought an astonishing change. Even most of south Asia is moving rapidly towards stabilising its fertility. Bangladesh is just above replacement rate now, and India is about 2.7, down from 3.3 a decade ago. Pakistan is more problematic, but it too has come down sharply over the past 10 years, from about 5 to a bit over 3. Of course, the 30-odd-year lag between the reduction in fertility and the reduction in population means the numbers of people born in these countries will continue to grow for decades yet.

India’s population is still growing quickly, but its fertility rate has sharply declined. In some Indian cities there are only 800 women for every 1000 men.

By mid-century, India will be by far the world’s most populous country.

Africa is more difficult. Its fertility rate is falling, but more slowly, and still is above 4.5.

There are several likely reasons for this: the continent’s troubled economies, political instability and lack of education among them.

Yet over the past couple of decades, the resources going to family planning in sub-Saharan Africa have declined, says Jose Miguel Guzman, chief of the population and development branch of the United Nations Population Fund.

Again, this change is due to several factors: the political influence of the anti-birth-control religious right in America, the developed world’s economic crisis of the past five years, and the diversion of aid to other concerns, notably addressing Africa’s HIV epidemic.

“I’ve seen a very illuminating graph that shows global assistance for HIV/AIDS and family planning. They are inverse curves,” Peter McDonald says.

Over the past couple of years, though, there have been increased efforts to again develop family planning programs in Africa.

“The Gates Foundation is now involved and providing substantial support,” McDonald says.

“It’s not just aid of course, but you need to have stable governments capable of running family-planning programs.”

The hope, he says, is that increased investment in Africa and consequent economic growth will do for Africa what it did for Asia: bring greater stability and cause the birth rate to fall sharply.

We might add that western authorities, even the political conservatives in the United States, are beginning to recognise their self-interest in a more stable, lower-fertility south Asia and Africa. It’s not just a matter of resources. They are waking up to what is sometimes called the demographics of terrorism.

Countries with large numbers of young, poor men breed extremism. Just look at the 10 countries with the highest fertility rates. The list includes Niger, Mali, Somalia, South Sudan, Uganda, the Republic of the Congo, and one non-African nation, Afghanistan.

Singapore is importing people at a phenomenal rate. Without immigration, by 2100 the population would be under half a million and mostly geriatric citizens.

Not far behind, in fertility terms, we have Angola, Sudan, Eritrea, Yemen, Gaza, and Nigeria, among others.

The political right in the developed world is apt to blame Islam for terrorism. But the real roots of the problem are youth, masculinity, poverty and the lack of education, opportunity, and good governance.

And those things all relate, directly or indirectly, to demography.

Consider three big Islamic countries in which Islamic terrorism does not flourish: Bangladesh, Indonesia and Turkey, which are not only democratic and developing, but whose respective fertility rates of 2.38, 2.19 and 2.15, put them very close to replacement rate.

And consider this also: as the populations of the developed world decline and age, working-age people, from whatever source, will be in great demand. The asylum seekers so often scorned today — those Afghans, Sri Lankans, and Africans — are likely to be the immigrants we value tomorrow.

Bottom line: there are lots of reasons to care about the future of the high-fertility countries, beyond altruism.

The problems of low-fertility, of declining populations, are a whole lot more difficult to solve, for they challenge the foundation of the social and economic structures of the the developed world, and therefore of the whole world as we know it.

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The Guardian reports:

The infant, who is now two and a half, needs no medication for HIV, has a normal life expectancy and is highly unlikely to be infectious to others, doctors believe.

Though medical staff and scientists are unclear why the treatment was effective, the surprise success has raised hopes that the therapy might ultimately help doctors eradicate the virus among newborns.

This is an interesting case in that while 98% of children born to HIV positive mothers have received enough antiretroviral drugs to minimize the amount of virus in their blood, “the mother [of this child] was unaware she had HIV until after a standard test came back positive while she was in labour.”

“She was too near delivery to give even the dose of medicine that we routinely use in labour. So the baby’s risk of infection was significantly higher than we usually see,” said Gay.

Doctors began treating the baby 30 hours after birth. Unusually, they put the child on a course of three antiretroviral drugs, given as liquids through a syringe. The traditional treatment to try to prevent transmission after birth is a course of a single antiretroviral drug. The doctor opted for the more aggressive treatment because the mother had not received any during her pregnancy.

Several days later, blood drawn from the baby before treatment started showed the child was infected, probably shortly before birth. The doctors continued with the drugs and expected the child to take them for life.

However, within a month of starting therapy, the level of HIV in the baby’s blood had fallen so low that routine lab tests failed to detect it.

The team believe the child was cured because the treatment was so potent and given swiftly after birth. The drugs stopped the virus from replicating in short-lived, active immune cells, but another effect was crucial. The drugs also blocked the infection of other, long-lived white blood cells, called CD4, which can harbour HIV for years. These CD4 cells behave like hideouts, and can replace HIV that is lost when active immune cells die.

Hopefully this does not prove to be just an extraordinary case.

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“It’s a new day in the state of Illinois,” proclaimed Senator Martin Sandoval before voting to legalize marriage equality for same-sex couples in the prairie state. The state Senate approved the bill 34 to 21, and after a vote at the state House, which is held by the Democrats, the state should be on its way to becoming the nation’s 10th to grant equal rights to gay couples. Governor Pat Quinn has pledged to sign the bill once it arrives on his desk.

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On this Valentine’s Day, social media spreads the virtues of familial love across the world:

“Here’s my sweet not so little newborn! His name is Latrell and weighs 112 lbs.,” his mom Kelli Higgins proudly announced on Facebook, where the boy’s simple wish created an online sensation.

Unlike many adoption cases, Higgins and her husband did not adopt Latrell and his sister, Chanya, when they were newborns:

“These children, once they get past a certain age, they don’t find homes and they age out of foster care,” Higgins told TODAY.com.

“They have to figure out the world on their own and there’s no one to go back to as an adult. Where do you go for Christmas? It’s just horrible, it’s heartbreaking.”

Then one day, social services called: Latrell and Chanya, then 10 and 5, were looking for a family. “Let’s just go for it,” Higgins recalled her husband saying. A few days later, the kids moved in. The Higgins were the only ones to submit paperwork to adopt the pair, the family found out.

The older a child is when her or she  is adopted, the more he or she misses out on specific life events that every child deserves to experience:

“The family was sitting around the dinner table last month, when Higgins – a professional photographer – mentioned that she was preparing for an upcoming baby photo session. Latrell mentioned that he wished he had baby photos of himself.”

Higgins’ 12-year-old daughter asked, why not “recreate” a newborn photo shoot just for Latrell? The family had a good laugh thinking about him in all the newborn poses.

“I thought it was funny and that it would be a good idea,” Latrell told TODAY.com. His mom found the notion bittersweet.

“I was very sad too because I didn’t have any photos of him either,” Higgins said. “I think it’s really hard to have children and not know what they looked like when they were younger.”

Higgins and Latrell went into her studio the next day, both laughing hysterically the whole time, she recalled.

While some people have raised concerns that Latrell would be embarrassed by the photos, he told TODAY.com that he likes the results and that everyone he has showed the photos to thinks they are funny. Meanwhile, positive reaction is overflowing on Higgins’ Facebook page, where the photos have been shared thousands of times and prompted hundreds of comments of support.

While the photos themselves are lovely and unique, when they went viral, an even more wonderful thing happened:

Higgins is particularly excited to start a conversation about adopting older kids.

“The one reaction that is really humbling and I’m really excited about is there have been a lot of parents that come to me telling me that they were thinking about adopting a baby, but after seeing those photos it’s changed their minds and they want to adopt an older child,” Higgins said.

There were more than 104,000 children in foster care who were waiting to be adopted in 2011, the last full year for which government statistics are available. The median age of a child waiting to find an adoptive home was 7, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

“Over the last decade, I’m seeing more older children available to be adopted and more people who are interested in adopting them,” said Gloria Hochman, a spokeswoman for the National Adoption Center.

People who adopt older kids tend to already have children and have experience dealing with pre-teens and teens, she said. There’s more help available now to families through post-adoption services, she added.

Back in Florida, Higgins said the lesson Latrell taught her is simple: We are never too old to want — and deserve — love, security and parents.

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