Death from chickens and the baby dearth

Eat more chicken?

Did you see the reporting on the Italian study that chicken eaters have a greater chance of dying from gastrointestinal cancers? It says that eating more than 300 grams of chicken per week elevates the risk of cancer. (sorry Chick-fil-A cows). Yet other studies show that saturated fat is higher in red meat than poultry and white meat and studies have shown that red meat increases the risk of heart disease more than white meat. The plant lovers are doing high fives. The Italian study did not reveal how the chicken was prepared. Do the Italians do fried chicken and chicken fingers? I am particularly fond of putting cubed chicken on my pesto pizzas. The study did not account for physical fitness or physical activity or individual diets. But the sample was over 4,000 participants and its difficult to imagine that somehow randomly the chicken eaters were sloths who shunned vegetables and fruits. However, I would be a bit suspicious if I found out that the research was sponsored by PETA.

Somehow I am reminded of the old saw about Colonel Sanders going to heaven and finding out that God is a chicken.

I haven’t eaten red meat – other than that which I kill myself – since 1971. But even before that I didn’t eat veal since I was six when I found out that my grandfather had slaughtered my pet calf – Billy – and its body parts were now in grandmother’s freezer.

I do think that how they raise chickens is beyond shameful and is cruel and inhumane, Also they are injected with hormones and other bad stuff. No wonder the Europeans restrict importing American agriculture. Slaughterhouses are also horrible, My Dad told me that he and his brothers were migrant laborers to make tuition to go to college and sometimes had to work in slaughterhouses. He too said it is best not to see how sausages are made. It’s a miracle that he insisted on meat at every meal (or else it wasn’t food). But Dad did have a history of stomach problems and died from gastrointestinal cancer at age 88. Dad was born in 1913 and his life expectancy was 58 years. He was fond of saying of how every day past 58 was a blessing. When he was told that he had stomach cancer and that because of his previous stomach surgeries that they could not take any more of his stomach, he opted not to have any further medical treatment. His reaction to what the doctors told him was not “why me” but “why not me.” Miss you Dad.

Less chicken but more babies?

All of a sudden there is this interest in the world not producing enough babies. I bet Mathus is shocked. The replacement rate is 2.1 and all developed countries are well below that. The average in the world is 2.24. The US fertility rate is 1.63 which means a shrinking population with all its attendant problems. However, consider that the major cause of the drop in childbirths in the US is not the rise in income, the rise of women in the workforce but rather the decrease in births among teenagers. Birthrates actually increased in 2024 for women 25-44 but decreased for those 15-24. Hispanic and Asian women had increases in fertility rates in 2024 while fertility rates for black women declined 4%—the largest year-over-year decrease. Abortion plays a large part of the black statistics. Black Americans make up 11.7% of people living in the United States but account for 39.5% of all abortions. Forty-three black babies will die by abortion for every 100 live births. Abortions outnumber live births in New York City. Over half of Planned Parenthood’s 2 million clients are black women. Margaret Sanger would be proud.

Most of the fertility rates above replacement are in the Middle East and Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa. But those rates are falling too and are below those in Europe in the last century. Asian rates are the lowest with Japan at 1.23, China at 1.02 and South Korea at 0.74. Some people have pointed to immigration as a solution to the falling population in the US. However, the countries from which most of the immigrants come also have fertility rates below replacement. What can be done? Virtually all efforts worldwide have failed. Elon Musk (who is trying to raise the fertility rate by himself) proposes a $5,000 “baby bonus.” That’s a joke right? Even the Scandinavian countries with their generous welfare have low fertility rates. Norway for example provides free kindergarten and 80 percent of salary for the first 12 months of the baby’s life. Fertility is 1.46. In our country, we don’t have free kindergarten – I wish we did for working mothers below a certain income level – but we do have a plethora of programs to benefit parents. There is the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid coverage for poorer households. There are also Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit, child care subsidies, rental housing assistance, the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, school meals, and cash welfare. And these are just at the Federal level. However, as Federal support has increased, the birthrate has decreased.

To date, there have been no successful programs to incentivize women to have more babies. Personally, I think that for a growing number of people worldwide having children is expensive, stressful, time consuming and a pain in the rear. Even those of us who love children I think breathe a sigh of relief when they finally leave the household. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) the requisite number of children are born from artificial insemination, hatched in laboratories and raised by the state in nurseries. Will we come to that given the failure of economic incentives to produce more births? Stay tuned.