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When the NFL wants to make a play for a particular demographic, they go long. To attract Latinos, it forged partnerships with Univision and Telemundo. To keep women happy, it came out with a clothing line featuring shirts that actually fit better than those boxy jerseys.

Now, to engage children, the NFL is going where kids go: Nickelodeon. NFL Rush Zone: Season of the Guardians is a new series rolling out Friday, co-branded by the NFL and Nicktoons.

The hero is 11-year-old Ish Taylor, who lives in Canton, Ohio — conveniently home to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Peter O'Reilly, the NFL's vice president for fan strategy and marketing, says Ish and his friends are superheroes called "guardians."

"They've really been tapped to — with special powers and special responsibilities — to protect football and the world from the evil forces that are out there," O'Reilly says.

Stars of the NFL show up: Drew Brees of the New Orleans Saints, DeMarcus Ware of the Dallas Cowboys and Calvin Johnson of the Detroit Lions.

The NFL is a powerful brand, and Nickelodeon is clearly thrilled it was picked. A Nickelodeon press release boasts that this is the first time a major sports league has partnered with a cable network to create an original series.

Keith Dawkins, a senior VP at Nickelodeon, says the two companies came together because they recognized a common goal.

"They wanted to see if there was a different kind of way that they could tap into a fan base at a young age — 6, 7, 8 years old — and create these lifelong fans of the NFL. For us, [our interest is] the Nicktoons network — all animation, all the time, [a] 24-hour network really focusing on boys 6 to 11 — so that's when we realized there was a common sweet spot there," Dawkins said.

Rohit Bhargava, a marketing consultant and author of the book Likeonomics, says it's "a great idea that's starting to get its legs."

"The NFL is one of those few brands you can look at and say, you know what, they know what their brand and the media platform for their brand is going to look like in 10 years," he explains. "And a lot of brands don't have an answer for that."

But as a parent, Bhargava says the NFL should also address the real dangers of football.

"Just the safety of playing football, [given] the discussion around concussions and kids playing football. And so I think this effort to kind of involve children in the NFL, but also to think about the role for football for kids in a responsible way, is going to be a huge thing for the NFL moving forward," Bhargava says.

Ish — the hero of NFL Rush Zone — plays pee-wee football, but injuries are the least of his problems. He's got 32 NFL teams to protect from evil villains with names like Wild Card and Sudden Death.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner took the administration's plan to avert the so-called fiscal cliff to skeptical Republicans on Capitol Hill on Thursday. The proposal would increase taxes on the wealthiest by $1.2 trillion and cut Medicare by $400 billion over a decade.

A new report finds the U.S. birth rate has dropped to its lowest level on record, led by a dramatic decline in births among immigrant women. The trend has been visible at La Clinica del Pueblo, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., that holds a weekly neonatal clinic.

"We went from about 100 [pregnancies] to 90, to 80, another year with 80, and then 70," says Dr. Madeline Wilks. Her patients are largely foreign-born Hispanics. Some are in the U.S. legally, some are not, and many are uninsured.

Wilks isn't exactly sure why so many have decided not to have babies in recent years. "We've been puzzling over that," she says.

A Trying Economy

The drop is all the more striking because immigrants have long propped up the U.S. birth rate, keeping it higher than that of many other developed nations. But Thursday's report by the Pew Research Center finds that while the U.S. birth rate is down generally since the recession, it's fallen twice as much among the foreign-born.

Many of La Clinica del Pueblo's immigrant patrons hold low-wage jobs with no benefits like paid leave, says Wilks, making money a worry for many of her clients. "We do have people who just can't feed their families if they're not working. And they can't work when they're with new babies."

Wilks says she even had a patient last year who put her baby up for adoption. "And that's just not done in this community," she says. "I've never seen that. But she just really clearly said, 'I need to give my baby a chance.' And it was heartbreaking."

Dr. Joshua Kolko, another physician at La Clinica del Pueblo, says he sees more women carefully planning their pregnancies. Long-term contraceptives are particularly popular, he says.

"A lot of women are coming to us and asking for some means of contraception," he says, "or of timing their pregnancies for when they are in a more stable situation."

Better Planning

The Pew report also breaks down birth rates by national origin — with particularly significant findings for some populations.

"We found that for Mexicans in particular, the declines were really dramatic," says Pew senior researcher Gretchen Livingston. Researchers found the birth rate for Mexican immigrants has fallen a stunning 23 percent since 2007.

She says previous Pew research has found a strong link between fertility and those who fared worst in the recent recession.

"Hispanics were the hardest hit in terms of employment," she says. "Their wealth declined by something like 66 percent during the recession." Also important, she notes, is that "Hispanics perceive themselves as being extremely hard hit by the recession."

'We Don't Know If We're Going To Be Here Tomorrow'

There may be other factors at work beyond the economy. There's also been an ongoing, if less publicized, crackdown on workplaces that employ those in the U.S. illegally. The number of deportations rose to nearly 400,000 in 2011 — a record level.

That uncertainty has immigrants second-guessing their choices, says Xiomara Corpeno of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles.

"There is a lot more uncertainty. ... Like, well, 'We're together, we have this family, we'd love to expand it, but we don't know if we're going to be here tomorrow,' " she says.

Even if immigrants continue grappling with those wrenching decisions, the Pew report projects that the foreign born will continue to drive U.S. population growth in coming decades. The vast majority of births, the researchers predict, will be to immigrants who've arrived just since 2005 and their descendants.

A new draft constitution will be unveiled in Cairo on Thursday, but it is far from clear whether the move will help resolve or deepen the crisis between President Mohamed Morsi and Egypt's judges. Robert Siegel talks with Leila Fadel, who is in Cairo.