ROME, November 16, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The news about abortion, marriage, divorce and the birth rate in Europe is bad and only getting worse, a report recently presented to the EU said.
According to the report by the Institute for Family Policies abortion rates in Britain have leaped by a third among unmarried teenage girls and abortion is helping to age the population of Europe. Without a massive shift to family-friendly policies, the pattern of increased abortion and increasingly aging population will inevitably lead to the collapse of social welfare benefits, and, ultimately, to the bankruptcy of Europe’s cradle-to-grave socialist welfare state.
Presented to the European Parliament on Wednesday, the report said that the situation of the family in Europe is «a desolate panorama.»
«Europe is plunged in an unprecedented demographic winter and has become an elderly continent, with a large birth deficit, fewer marriages and more of them broken, homes emptying.»
«The aging population, critical birth-rate, escalating abortions, the collapse of marriage, the explosion in family breakups and the emptying of homes are the main problems of Europeans,» the 2009 Report on the Evolution of the Family in Europe said.
The study found that the annual number of abortions in the EU equals the entire combined population of its ten smallest member states, with the three top aborting countries being Britain, France and Romania. In Europe there is one abortion every 25 seconds, for a total of more than 1,200,000 abortions a year. 19 percent of all European pregnancies end in abortion and 28 million children have been killed by abortion since 1990, making abortion the main cause of death in Europe.
The population over 65 years in all European states already exceeds the population under 14 years. The EU under 14 population has fallen from 89 million in 1993 to 78.4 million in 2008. Over-65s have risen from 68.3 million in 1993 to 84.9 million in 2008 – an increase of 16.5 million elderly people. The average age of EU citizens is 40.3 years, with Italy and Germany having the highest populations of elderly people.
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