Liberals received some good news yesterday.

From a Feb. 20 story on the website of USA Today:

The U.S. population is growing at the slowest rate since the Great Depression after two decades of robust increases....

The government says the recession ended in June 2009. Although the economy has improved, the downturn's effect on birth and immigration lingers. The number of babies born from July 1, 2010, to July 2011 dropped 200,000 from the same period in 2008-09. The number of additional immigrants fell 150,000....

The U.S. fertility rate - which has been close to the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman in contrast to many developed nations that are well below that level - now is estimated to have fallen to 1.9, says demographer Joseph Chamie, former director of the United Nations Population Division and more recently research director at the Center for Migration Studies....

For years we've heard liberals whining about so-called overpopulation. There are too many people and the environment is in grave danger, they say. Their solution? Promote, in stealth fashion, widespread abortion, contraception, sterilization, euthanasia and, yes, same-sex "marriage." (After all, one doesn't have to worry about homosexuals procreating.) Of course, they do so under the guise of women's health, "family planning," tolerance, diversity and equality.   

Speaking of sterilization, despite the Catholic Church's teaching against the procedure, it appears that nearly half of Catholic hospitals are involved in it.  

From Catholic World News (Feb. 20):

In a doctoral dissertation presented at Baylor University in Texas, Sandra Hapenney studied 176 Catholic hospitals, across 7 states. Of those hospitals, 85 -- or 48% -- performed tubal ligations. Hapenney's study of hospital records found over 20,000 cases of direct sterilizations at those institutions between 2007 and 2009 ... The inclusion of coverage for sterilization in the Obama administration's health-care plans has been the subject of a keen debate in recent weeks, with Catholic bishops saying that Church-related institutions cannot in conscience subsidize the procedure....

No word on whether there's been an increase in the, um, use of Bayer aspirin.