Are Women Having Fewer Children to Have More Fun?

Chrystia Freeland, in her latest column, notes that the United States birthrate has plunged to its lowest ever, following declines in Europe and even China.

Then she joins the debate over why, pointing out that researchers like Joel Kotkin lament that the falling birthrate is the central feature of ” ‘post-familialism,' a new form of social organization that prizes liberation, personal happiness and perhaps even a ‘hip' urban aesthetic over the more traditional values of community and self-sacrifice,” Chrystia says.

This cultural critique - made, not accidentally, mostly by men - misses the central fact about falling birthrates. They are, above all, driven by decisions by women. And, in the countries where we have seen birthrates drop, they are about decisions driven by women who face three defining facts.

First, women have the historically unprecedented power to c ontrol their own fertility.

Second, the old close-knit family and community ties that once supported child-rearing have been severed by industrialization and urbanization, and not much has emerged to take their place.

Third, women's economic circumstances have been transformed. Women in countries where birthrates have fallen tend to be richer than were previous generations with higher birthrates or their sisters in countries where the birthrate is still high.

Chrystia concludes that in middle-income and rich nations, falling birthrates are also a reflection of how deeply societies have failed to find a way to allow women to be both mothers and contributing members of the society outside the home. In essence, she says, with no solution on how to do it all, “now women are voting with their wombs.”

Do you agree? Are falling birth rates more the response of a desire for personal freedom or more a reflection of women deciding, as s ociety has not helped them, that they cannot have it all?

IHT Quick Read: Dec. 7

NEWS Egypt descended deeper into political turmoil on Thursday as the embattled president, Mohamed Morsi, vowed to proceed with a referendum on an Islamist-backed constitution that has prompted deadly street battles between his supporters and their opponents. David D. Kirkpatrick reports from Cairo.

Kurdish militias have joined the fighting in Syria and are seeking autonomy, raising fears of balkanization if the government of President Bashar al-Assad falls. Tim Arango reports from Ceylanpinar, Turkey.

A blaze that killed 112 workers in Bangladesh last month exposed a disconnect among retailers like Sears and Walmart, the monitoring system to protect workers and the factories fillin g the orders. Jim Yardley reports from Ashulia, Bangladesh.

Apple plans to join a small but growing number of companies that are bringing some manufacturing jobs back to the United States, drawn by the growing economic and political advantages of producing in their home market. Catherine Rampell and Nick Wingfield report.

The fashion designer Pierre Cardin has a dream of turning a Venice industrial dump into a futuristic palazzo, leading to a debate about the city's future. Elisabetta Povoledo reports from Venice.

ARTS “Yo, Adrian! I'm singin'!”: A stage musical based on the 1976 movie “Rocky” has proved a hit in Hamburg, Germany. Now i ts producers hope to bring it to Broadway. Patrick Healy reports from Hamburg.

Love may or may not make the world go round, but it's certainly doing its bit for the London theater, from “Twelfth Night” and “Kiss Me Kate” to “Boy Meets Boy” and “The Effect,” the galvanic new play by Lucy Prebble. Matt Wolf on theater.

SPORTS While there are other high points in the international horse-racing calendar - the Arc de Triomphe event in France, the Breeders' Cup in the United States and Royal Ascot in England - nobody rolls out the welcome mat like Hong Kong and Dubai. But shipping horses has its risks. Gina Rarick on racing.

The t riumph of Celtic and the elimination of Chelsea on the final night of Champions League group games showed that there is more than wealth - and even more than individual ability - to staying in the toughest soccer competition on earth. Rob Hughes on soccer.

Love Unleashed on the London Stage

LONDON-Love may or may not make the world go round, but it's certainly doing its bit for the London theater. On stages large and small, across new plays and revivals and musicals, too, the vagaries of passion are fueling one show after another. “Cantiamo D'Amore” â€" “we sing of love” â€" or so announces a number in “Kiss Me, Kate,” the Cole Porter musical that has been newly revived in a Trevor Nunn-directed production at the Old Vic that, truth be told, is a mixed bag.

But the assemblage in that song-and-dance chestnut by no means own the copyright at the moment on the vagaries of the heart. Whether Heather Headley's Rachel Marron in “The Bodyguard” is blasting out “I Will Always Love You” as an 11 o'clock number that has seemed an awfully long time coming, or the Parisian chanteuse (Anna Nicholas) in the altogether delightful “Boy Meets Boy” is crooning “Oh l'amour, l'amour,” passion is partout, as they say across the Channel, on the L ondon stage just now.

The extent of the emotions unleashed by love can be staggering to behold. At first glance, for instance, one hardly expects the prim-seeming, pancake-faced figure cut by Mark Rylance's Olivia to give way so giddily â€" bawdily, even â€" to the dictates of the heart. (I'm referring, of course, to the all-male “Twelfth Night,” which has taken up residency at the Apollo through Feb. 9 after a sellout preview period this past summer at Shakespeare's Globe.) But just watch as a figure all but immured in floor-length black throws caution to a very indecorous wind, Mr. Rylance by play's end all but falling about the stage in an erotic fury.

“Boy Meets Boy,” the period divertissement at the Jermyn Street Theatre through Dec. 20, is populated by what might seem a comparably buttoned-up gathering of swells who gravitate naturally toward the luxe of the Dorchester and the Sav oy. (And why not, given that we're talking 1936 and a sort of between-the-wars sybaritism.) But Gene David Kirk's affectionate production charts what happens when an expat American journalist and roué by the name of Casey (Stephen Ashfield, terrific) moves beyond matters sartorial to learn that love can, in fact, be about more than laughs: feeling runs deep, as Casey through a nearly-Shakespearean sequence of mistaken identities and disguises comes to learn, which in turn means putting frivolity to one side.

Reviving a show first seen Off Broadway in the 1970s, Mr. Kirk has mounted what could have been a mere curiosity at a 70-seat central London venue for a fraction of the cost of either “Kiss Me, Kate” or “The Bodyguard” to results that are consistently more beguiling than either of those (though “The Bodyguard,” to be fair, is all but done in by the intractability of its ludicrous source). What's lovely in “Boy Meets Boy” is the total lack of fuss made by a piece that takes gay marriage in its stride â€" and this from a 1975 musical, no less. But no less lovely is the about-face undergone by a hero who may tell us “never again will I fall in love” only to end up doing precisely that. And with a gusto that Mr. Rylance's Olivia would well understand.

Love's uncertainty, meanwhile, is the galvanic guiding force behind “The Effect,” the new Lucy Prebble play recently opened at the National. “I do love him, I think,” says Billie Piper's achingly febrile Connie, one of two subjects who have been brought in to test a powerful new anti-depressant under the watchful eye of two older doctors who were once themselves an item. Tom Goodman-Hill and Anastasia Hille play the medics, and very well (she, especially).

So, what then is Connie to make of the rush of emotions she feels towards Jonjo O'Neill's sparky, occasionally spiky Tristan, who in turn is so overtaken by love himself that he is briefly rendere d a song-and-dance man in order to accommodate his surging heart? (“I've Got You Under My Skin” is the musical accompaniment, in case you're wondering.)

Her first play since “Enron,” which was a London hit and subsequent New York flop, the far-superior “Effect” examines the causality of attraction with more humor than one might expect from a sometimes dry first half that includes a lengthy discourse delivered straight to the audience on the workings of the brain. (Hey, who says the theater can't educate as well as entertain?) But as the two couples come together and part to disorienting, well, effect, “The Effect” burrows painfully deep into behavioral realms that we assume to be beyond science. Or, in this case, maybe not.

The play, and Rupert Goold's matchless production of it, are talked about for a commercial transfer next year. How nice with the 2012 theater year not yet over that 2013 has already promised an opening to love.

At Art Basel Miami Beach, Hopeful Artists Showing in a Hotel

MIAMI BEACH - As dealers in the main fair at Art Basel Miami Beach were counting up six- and seven-figure sales from Wednesday's V.I.P. preview, participants in SELECT, one of the numerous nearby satellite fairs here, were welcoming guests at the Catalina Hotel. The hopeful artists and gallery owners who paid $4,000 to $5,000 to transform one of the hotel's 64 rooms into a mini gallery, installation space or performance site had different expectations than their brethren a few blocks away.

“I'm hoping to find a gallery to represent me,” said Mariusz Navartil, a Miami artist whose swirling red, black and white works were done with acrylic paint and ink pen. A few doors down, Christopher Maslow stored extra canvases in the shower and masked the toilet with a covered table that held opening night bottles of wine and plastic cups.

Ginny Sykes, a mixed media artist, had journeyed with four other women from Chicago in a bid to gain wider exposure for their work. “I asked myself: ‘Can I afford to do this even if nothing happens?'” said Ms. Sykes, whose prices range from $80 to $1,500. Her suitemate Kathleen Waterloo said that a Washington gallery had started to represent her after seeing her work, geometric encaustic paintings, at a satellite fair in Miami a few years ago. Ms. Waterloo, whose work is priced from $250 to $850, has been enthusiastically detailing the group's adventures, artistic and otherwise, on Twitter and Facebook.

The directors of SELECT, Brian Whiteley, 29, and Matthew Eck, 24, supervised a different fair at the Catalina last year before striking out on their own.

“Here artists can showcase their work as they'd like it to be shown,” said an ebullient Mr. Eck.

Curtiss Jacobs, a Wall Street financier who founded Renaissance Fine Art on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard in Harlem, said he was impressed with the directors' enthusiasm. He took over two rooms on the hotel's second floor to showcase alabaster sculptures by Ousmane Gueye ($12,000 to $75,000) and an installation made of butcher block paper by Dianne Smith.

Ideally, Mr. Jacobs hopes SELECT will bring in both sales and publicity, but he was philosophical. “It's a learning experience.”

Trust Women Conference: One Delegate\'s Reflections

LONDON - The first Trust Women conference, hosted by ThomsonReuters Foundation and the International Herald Tribune, in London this week boasted an impressive line up of speakers - from Melanne Verveer, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for global women's issues, to Christy Turlington Burns of Every Mother Counts, from Mabel van Oranje of The Elders to Queen Noor of Jordan, to name a few.

The conference confronted difficult subjects like modern-day slavery, the role of women in the Arab Spring, child marriage, corruption and development. And the opening speech was delivered by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi by video.

Having grown up with her widowed mother, she said, when she was small she thought women ruled the world. The Burmese politician was the second woman in history to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1991. She said she couldn't empathize more with the title of the conference “Trust Women.” She said, “We women have to learn to trust ourselves much more tha n society has perhaps allowed us to do.”

Sessions on how to change laws, enforce existing laws and change mind-sets to empower women led inevitably to discussion of the role women play in passing their predicament on to future generations. Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian lawyer and human rights activist featured in my film “Lili's Journey,” said, “Men are children of women, they are raised by women, and often these notions of patriarchy are carried from generation to generation even more fiercely by the women themselves.”

Dr. Ebadi, also a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, has set out with volunteers to collect one million signatures in Iran to address the gender discrimination laws in the country's Constitution. “The aim is not to simply gather these million signatures, but to engage the entire society so that they themselves can be the change from within.”

“We tell them useful facts, unbeknownst to many like: Did you know that in an accident, the law dictates that compensation for your male counterpart will be twice the amount of yours?”

Nazir Afzal, Britain's chief crown prosecutor, told the conference that he was on a drive to bring those guilty of “the organized crime that is honor killing” to justice.

Most shockingly, he explained to the audience that a missing underage girl in Britain who is often forced into marriage and sent back to her parents' native country is not protected by the laws of the Western country in which she
is born.

He pointed out, “Nobody looks for them when they go missing. When your own family is at the origin of the harm that is being done to you, there is no one else
to ring the alarm bell for them.”

Home-grown grass-roots action and leadership is needed to change some of these vast issues in different cultures, which are intrinsically linked to strong traditions.
And whilst the concept of the “white savior complex” crossed a few minds at the conference, it was very obvious that the activists represented today need support but are deemed best placed to know how far to stretch their own communities, challenging their own specific circumstances and heritage.

They are not expecting anybody else to do it for them. Ms. van Oranje, senior adviser to the group known as The Elders, said, for instance, that “in the African countries where we are active, we are often told to keep our nose out, but the word of Desmond Tutu, the word of Kofi Annan is highly respected … to
them, it is the voice that comes from within” Africa.

The panel on the role of women and the Arab Spring brought about some of these perspectives. When journalist Katrin Bennhold of the International Herald Tribune asked the panel of women from Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Egypt whether they perceive Western women to be charging around with notions of what is best for them, the answer was rather candid.

â €œWe are not here to import Western laws” said Alaa Murabit, the founder of Voice of Libyan Women. Then she added, “We need a more accurate interpretation of the Shariah law to establish our new constitution.”

The comment upset an Iranian delegate who begged for clarification on what exactly it meant for women to be subjected to Shariah. What is the provision for women in a correct interpretation of Shariah law when it comes to gender equality, access to your children and to financial independence? The outburst threw a lot of questions into the air. They remained unanswered.

Personally, since producing my film, “Lili's Journey,” on women's empowerment, I am compelled by the topic of public-private partnerships to achieve some of the important development goals broached during the conference. I caught up with Alison Smale, executive editor of the IHT, and asked her about the role of businesses in this realm of women's rights and law.

“I think it 's easy to carp about it, but at the same time there are more and more corporations who are taking on the issue,” she said. “I don't think it's just window dressing. You have to have a determined or a convinced person within a corporation, someone capable of steering this new dialogue who will in turn convince others.”

Laetitia Belmadani is a Paris-based writer and film director.

Pressure Grows on Swiss Banks to Expose Tax Cheats\' Billions

LONDON - Spare a thought for wealthy tax cheats.

Action by the U.S. and European governments is hacking away at Switzerland's hallowed tradition of banking secrecy, threatening the Alpine nation's reputation as the coolest place to park hot money.

Under budgetary pressure to chase down every last tax dollar and euro, authorities are working with the Swiss to close the last loopholes in a banking regime that once made it the favored offshore haven.

The federal government in Bern said it signed a deal with the United States this week that will bring Switzerland in line with the U.S. Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), a law that obliges banks to share information about U.S. clients' assets.

In London, meanwhile, George Osborne, the British finance minister, gave Parliament details on Wednesday of a treaty with the Swiss that would allow him to levy tax on an estimated £40 billion, or $64 billion, held in secret Swiss bank accounts by British nationals.

Mr. Osborne said the £5 billion he expected to raise over the next six years amounted to “the largest tax evasion settlement in U.K. history.”

And, in Germany, officials in the region of North Rhine-Westphalia have been paying anonymous bank employees for illicitly compiled data discs that reveal billions of euros stashed in Swiss accounts by German depositors.

The Swiss authorities have been cooperating with foreign governments' efforts to track down hidden assets. At the same time, they have been trying to limit the impact of tougher measures on the banking sector.

Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, the Swiss president and finance minister, has said her country has no more interest in holding undeclared foreign funds.

But she has also said there is no room for further concessions in a tax deal with Germany that was rejected last month by the Bundesrat, the German upper house, after the opposition argued it was not tough enough.

Ms. Widmer-Schlumpf, who is holding talks on tax issues in Paris on Friday with François Hollande, the French president, said the stalemate with Germany could only be “good news” for German tax evaders.

She meanwhile wants a reluctant French government to accept a so-called Rubik agreement of the kind that Switzer land already has with Britain and Austria, but which the Bundesrat has rejected.

It would mandate Swiss banks withhold tax on individual accounts, without revealing the identity of the owners, thus preserving banking secrecy.

Bernard Droux, a Swiss private banker who heads an association of Geneva banks, said he hoped the German lower house, the Bundestag, would succeed in overcoming objections to adopting a similar deal.

Asked by the Tribune de Genève whether a banking sector under attack from all sides would be forced to adopt a “clean money” strategy, Mr. Droux replied: “We prefer to speak of a strategy of fiscal conformity.”

Whatever you call it, the trend towards closing the loopholes in Switzerland and elsewhere translates into big money for the taxman.

Dick Durbin and Al Franken, Democratic U.S. Senato rs, estimated this year that offshore tax havens and similar tax loopholes cost American taxpayers $100 billion a year.

According to Germany's Der Spiegel, Switzerland is being forced to ponder a future era of clean money in the face of the international crackdown.

The weekly said cracks had been appearing in the Swiss banking fortress since the 1980s.

“The abundance of money that was being hidden in Swiss accounts to avoid paying taxes, on the other hand, was not publicly discussed in Switzerland until recently,” according to Der Spiegel's Mathieu von Rohr.

“Everyone knew that it existed, but it only became an issue when other countries started running out of money during the debt crisis.”

However, he qu oted Jean Ziegler, a veteran Swiss campaigner against the banks, as challenging the perception that anything had changed. “No, the banditry of the banks is in full swing!” Mr. Ziegler declared.

Art Basel Miami Beach: Pregame Events

“Few events at Art Basel Miami Beach start before 11 a.m., so that everyone can recover from the previous evening's partying,” Patricia Cohen reports from the fair on our sister blog ArtsBeat.

Her dispatch on the first hours of the gathering included the scene at a video screening that reminded its audience of Hurricane Sandy:

On Tuesday night, before the fair opened for big collectors and VIPs at the Miami Beach Convention Center on Wednesday morning, the big event was the opening of the exhibition “Bill Viola: Liber Insularum” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami. Guests arrived by bus, taxi and limo, and many made their way to one of Mr. Viola's best known works, “The Raft,” a 2004 piece that had particular resonance for northeasterners in the crowd who had lived through Hurricane Sandy before coming south.

The video starts with a large group of people - As ian, black, white, old, young, in business and casual attire - standing together and waiting, as if for a bus. One person riffles through a pocketbook, another reads a book, a third stares into space. Without warning, gushes of water slam into them from both sides. The torrent then stops as suddenly as it began. Recorded with high-speed film, this drama unfolds over several minutes in slow motion, revealing each person's reaction - shock, anguish, bewilderment, relief and concern for those around them.

Successive rounds of visitors who were walking through the darkened rooms broke out in applause at the video's conclusion.

With a guard closely monitoring access to the exhibition, the museum's galleries functioned as a quiet refuge from the mob packed into the outdoor party. There was barely room to air kiss while waiting on line for a paper cup filled with pasta or a bagged sandwich. (More experienced attendees had filled up on oysters, shrimp and crab legs at th e official welcome reception that Art Basel and the City of Miami hosted at the Raleigh Hotel earlier in the evening.) The only food station that seemed to remain untouched by the Size 0 galleristas tottering on spiked platform heels was serving dessert.

Read more about the fair here, and follow it in the coming days on ArtsBeat and IHT Rendezvous.

Are you at Art Basel Miami Beach? What have you seen? What have you liked? Or not? Share your thoughts in the comment space below.

Raphael Drawing Fetches Nearly $50 Million

Sotheby's Raphael's “Head of Apostle.”

A Renaissance drawing from one of the most famous collections in Britain sold at Sotheby's in London on Wednesday night for $47.8 million, slightly more than twice its high $23.8 million estimate.

Four bidders fought for 17 minutes to win Raphael's “Head of Apostle,'' a study dating from around 1519 that was created for a figure in one of the artist's greatest late paintings, “Transfiguration,'' which belongs to the Vatican Museum in Rome.

The drawing, in black chalk, was from Chatsworth, the Derbyshire home of the Duke of Devonshire (who is deputy chairman of Sotheby's board of directors). It had belonged to the Duke's family since William Cavendish, the 2nd Duke of Devonshire, acquired it sometime either late in the 17th century or early in the 18th.

“Head of Apostle'' isn't the first drawing by Raphael to achieve a staggering sum. “Head of Muse,'' a study for a figure in “Parnassus,'' one of four frescoes also in the Vatican, brought a slightly higher price â€" $47.9 million â€" when it was bought by the New York financier Leon Black at Christie's in London three years ago.