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OTTAWA, September 26, 2002 (LSN.ca) – Canada has reached another record low in birth rates, with 327,882 babies born in 2000, the lowest number since 1946 when the country emerged from the Second World War and tens of thousands of men had been overseas nine months earlier. The implication is that modern values have now surpassed the most devastating war Canada has ever known in terms of creating childlessness.  At a time when the population is growing only through immigration, the fertility rate, the average number of children per woman aged 15 to 49, hit another record low of 1.49—down from the post-1951 peak of 3.94 births per woman in 1959. The largest annual drop in the “fertility” rate occurred among female teenagers, from 18.9 births for every 1,000 girls aged 15 to 19 in 1999 to a new low of 17.3.  So-called “fertility rates” are not, as the term might suggest, a reflection of “fertility” or the potential to have children; contraception and abortion skew actual fertility. In fact, there were at least 100,000 abortions – one for every three infants who were born alive—recorded per year during the past decade. Notable are the figures for teenage girls: in 1997 there were 21.5 abortions per 1,000 girls, compared to 14 in 1975, and since 1993 the majority of teen pregnancies have ended in abortion.  2001 Census coverage studies will be completed in 2003. But Statistics Canada’s release included the following table:  See the Thursday, September 26, 2002 Daily releases from Statscan https://www.statcan.ca/start.html