Most couples may have to use assisted reproduction by 2045
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I'm not anti-natalist. I want and intend to have children. But the world doesn't really need more humans than it already has. We're not adequately providing for them all.
Let me ask a naive question: If the birth rates in Western nations decline, and populations stabilize and stop growing, what's so bad about that?
How is a robot wiping your backside any different?
That is already pretty dehumanizing. As are decisions of opaque Facebook and Google algorithms to demonetize / disable your account, with no obvious recourse to living human beings.
IDK why, but being submitted to robotic decisions wakes extreme resistance in me.
Instead of a child, an adult must adapt to a very different culture. With lots of cultural clashes that are pretty obvious, especially in Europe, where a lot of the migrants come from the neighboring Islamic world with its very different social norms.
Not to mention that you rely on the fact that other nations do not stop reproducing. What if they do?
Countries like Bulgaria and Serbia have dropped into very low birthrates before becoming wealthy, thus they exist in the worst of worlds: educated and employable immigrants obviously choose places like England and Germany where they can make a lot more money, domestic youth migrates to the West too, leaving an old and vulnerable population without services.
The impact on finite, planetary resources is less taxed by immigration (1+0) than by birth (1+1).
Very true, but human beings can adapt. For example, all the Europeans that came to America 400-500 years ago are doing quite well today. The culture thing is just a red herring. All you are trying to do is maintain the status quo (nothing wrong with it).
Then they went for 'assisted reproduction' (in-vitro fertilization [IVF]). The first implantation lasted for a couple months, then she miscarried. The later embryos didn't take (I think they tried 2 more IVF cycles, from the frozen embryos). Eventually they gave up and started getting ready for adoption.
I went over to their house last Mothers day. They put ultrasound pictures in the box to surprise my mom. A older female friend of mine says she's seen this happen all the time: give up on 'trying', and the pregnancy will appear.
My brother and sister-in-law don't really talk to me about medical things, and I don't tell them where they're off. But I think her IUD was the "chemical castration" variety (plastic with the levonorgestrel, brand name Mirena). I never told them, "you shouldn't have trusted the pharmaceutical-industrial complex to not take your fertility away prematurely", as it was too late for that.
Progestins are sold to women as hormones that regulate their menstrual cycles, but really they're imitation hormones that suppress the menstrual cycle. Most modern women don't want a dozen pregnancies, most modern men don't want a herd of children to take care of, so FDA-approved fake hormones are an easy sell. But if we're actually concerned about the trend line from hyper-fertile to sub-fertile, being honest with women about what's in their "birth control" prescriptions is a good start.
[I hereby take credit for the anonymous edit that fixed the introduction of the Wikipedia entry for Progestogen. The fix has persisted across the years. Many others have come along to reword the introduction. Someone inserted a clarification to my edit to say that fake-hormones are used in Medicine, but my word insertion and reference are still there :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progestogen ]
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People say this about lots of things (stop looking for a perfect job, and it will appear, stop trying so hard to find the perfect mate, and they'll appear, etc), but that doesn't make it a valid strategy, even if it does happen sometimes.
Stop trying is why the Coronavirus pandemic got so bad in the US, and why a climate catastrophe is all but certain in the next couple of decades. Why so many people in the US get so fat and unhealthy (speaking as a fat and unhealthy American myself).
For every person who stopped trying and had what they wanted happen to them anyway, there's plenty of people where that hasn't been true.
Managing emotional stress is an important part of maintaining a pregnancy. My sister-in-law was also doing other therapeutic interventions. I think the final piece of her puzzle was letting go of needing to perform.
I think doing nothing special would have been more appropriate for the coronavirus: aggressive ventilation killed a lot of patients in New York. Fever hospitals [0] would have saved a lot of lives.
Problems are easier to solve when they are correctly understood.
[0] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/Lets-bring-back-Britains...