What’s the difference between Seattle and Salt Lake City? There are many differences, of course, but here’s one you might not know. In Seattle, there are nearly 45% more dogs than children. In Salt Lake City, there are nearly 19% more kids than dogs.

Katherine Marsh of The New Republic is hoping to have a baby, so she is taking a folic acid vitamin after breakfast each day. Folic acid, she explains, “is the gateway drug to parenthood–the idea of having a child becomes serious when you start worrying that it will have all its fingers and toes.”

I appeared last night on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees to talk about the controversy over chosen childlessness as a lifestyle. Anderson Cooper anchored the show from Baghdad while Heidi Collins served as interviewer for the segment on childlessness.

Vincent J. Schodolski, national correspondent for The Chicago Tribune, deals with the intentional childlessness issue in “Pitter-patter of Little Feet Isn’t for Them: Not Having Kids Sounds Great to Many Couples,” a front-page story in Sunday’s edition of the paper.

Dan Savage, writing in today’s edition of The New York Times, suggests that liberals should work to amend the U.S. Constitution in order to add “privacy” to the enumerated rights explicitly included in our governing document.

Just recently, I discussed the article by Professor Peter Singer in the “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow” series published in the September/October issue of Foreign Policy. The series is now available on-line, and that allows a look at another article in the project.

Jack Wertheimer writes about the problem of a falling Jewish birthrate in the October issue of Commentary. He writes with directness and insight:

Think you’ve seen it all? Look at this report from The Telegraph [London]:

Women are increasingly seeking inappropriate IVF treatment because they do not have the time or inclination for a sex life and want to “diarise” their busy lives.

Wealthy career women in their 30s and early 40s, some of whom have given up regular sex altogether, are turning to “medicalised conception” – despite being fertile and long before they have exhausted the possibility of a natural conception.

They are prepared to pay thousands of pounds for private IVF treatments – even though they have unpleasant and potentially harmful side effects – because they believe it offers them the best chance of “instant” pregnancy.

Further: Michael Dooley, a gynaecologist, obstetrician and fertility expert, said that in the past five years he has seen a 20 per cent increase in the number of patients seeking “inappropriate or premature” IVF treatment.

“Many of these couples are simply not having sex or not having enough sex,” he said. “Conception has become medicalised. It’s too clinical. There has been a trend away from having sex and loving relationships towards medicalised conception.”

Mr Dooley practises at Westover House clinic and the Lister Hospital, both in south-west London, and a clinic in Poundbury, Dorset. He said: “I have people who come to me for IVF who haven’t got time for sex. Those people don’t care about looking for a lifestyle or maximising their natural potential.”

So, the contraceptive revolution allowed sex without conception. Then the bio-tech revolution allowed conception without sex. Lost in all this is any biblical (or even organic) understanding of marriage and the meaning sex within the marital relationship. Procreation is severed from the one-flesh relationship and pregnancy is scheduled like business appointment.

I cannot think of a more graphic example of what happens when human beings begin to think of themselves as autonomous units, whose desires and needs can be disconnected from transcendent purpose and organic function. Sex, marriage, and procreation can be fully disconnected and then can be independently directed. George Orwell must be laughing from the grave.

On the marriage front, The Telegraph also reports: Marriage is in terminal decline, Government figures showed yesterday. Within 25 years nearly half of all men in their mid-forties and more than a third of women will not have walked up the aisle.

In the same period, the number of people cohabiting will have more than doubled to nearly four million.

The figures published in a Population Trends report by Whitehall actuaries prompted fresh warnings from family campaigners that Government policies had marginalised marriage.

At the national level, the abortion debate is often discussed only in terms of laws, court decisions, and public controversies. In reality, every one of the million-plus abortions performed in America each year comes as a result of a private decision, often made without concern for public analysis. This point is made abundantly clear in a major article published in the September 18, 2005 edition of The New York Times. In a story titled “Under Din of Abortion Debate, an Experience Shared Quietly,” reporter John Leland recounted conversations he experienced during a visit to Little Rock Family Planning Services, an abortion clinic located in the Arkansas capital.