Good morning. 
A new year and new decade in Whitewater begin with sunshine and a high of forty. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:31 PM, for 9h 05m 34s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 34.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand one hundred forty-ninth day.
On this day in 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation takes effect in Confederate territory.
Recommended for reading in full —
Aubrey Whelan reports Study: Counties that lost auto plants suffered spike in opioid overdoses:
U.S. counties that weathered the closure of auto assembly factories saw a spike in opioid overdoses in the five years after the plants were shut down, a new study from the University of Pennsylvania has found.
The findings are a window into how economic instability can drive a public health crisis, said lead author Atheendar Venkataramani, an assistant professor of health policy and medicine at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine.
Factory closures “are a culturally significant shock to the economy, which has a real effect on depressing economic opportunities for people over a long period of time,” he said. “When there is a contraction of economic activities — when people feel the economy and society is shifting in a way that it reduces their chances of upward mobility and happiness, you see this despair set in.”
The study, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, looked at overdose mortality rates among 18- to 65-year-olds in 112 manufacturing counties — places where most workers are in the manufacturing industry, primarily in the Midwest and South — that were home to at least one auto assembly plant.
Between 1999 and 2016, overdose rates in counties that lost their auto plants were 85% higher than in counties that retained their factories.
In their analysis, Venkataramani and his co-authors controlled for other factors that might have contributed to a rise in overdose deaths, such as national shifts in the availability of opioids and the onset of the Great Recession.
Shamane Mills reports The Reasons Behind Wisconsin’s Falling Birth Rate (‘Report Cites Following Reasons: Women Having Fewer Children At Later Age, Fewer Teen Births, Young Adults Leaving State’):
The reasons behind this pattern and what it could mean for a state with a rapidly aging population are outlined in “The Birth Dearth: Falling Fertility Rates, Fewer Babies,” a report prepared by Forward Analytics, the research arm of the Wisconsin Counties Association.
One reason is that women are delaying motherhood.
Instead of starting a family in their early 20s, they are waiting longer. From 2007 to 2017, the median age of a mother having her first-born child rose from 24 to 26. And many are holding off starting a family until their 30s, according to the report. That segment of mothers has actually increased.
However, that rise in births is countered by a large drop in teen pregnancies and millennials leaving the state. The latter could signal long-term challenges for Wisconsin and other states if the trend continues.
The report states this could have significant consequences for economic growth and for the funding of major federal programs such as Social Security and Medicare.