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Comment by yulaow | Hacker News Reader

I mean... cool but that's not addressing the problem at all (which is that having kids is too costly and risky right now, we have negligible infertility issues instead) because to pay for this you probably would have to pay far more than needed to allow current fertile population to have kids "the standard way", which needs: social support, controlled house prices and paternal/maternal pay leave.

In this case instead you would have to pay not only for the whole "babies farm" (which sounds extremely costly) but then also to grow and educate every single kid at least for 18-22 years without real parents/community.

It sounds like making the solution even worse than the problem.

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It's not even a solution for the problem. Making the baby is super easy, being pregnant is relatively easy compared to raising the kid, having the kid is pretty difficult for a day or two then you've got a few weeks of recovery. The hard part comes in the following 5-10 years.

40-50 years if you are in the unlucky 1-5% and have a child with a severe developmental issue.

The chances are low, lower if it's legal to do an abortion on a fetus with the associated markers, but they're still there. Parents may never not have a child to care for, one who can not reciprocate in their later years.

Yea I think the problem is not the inability to produce babies, but rather the high cost required to raise them in stable households (education, healthcare, opportunities).

It is certainly high cost for the woman to produce a baby. I would not want to put my body through what my wife put hers through.

If I could alleviate my wife of the pain and risks associated with childbirth, I'd do it.

But it seems that nature has some division of responsibilities cut out for us.

Even with additional costs it'll still be beneficial in form of lowered birth trauma and death. Also, mother will be able to work for the whole period and pay for it.

Mothers tend to work fine for the first 30-35 weeks of a pregnancy

Talk about dystopian. This is some Brave New World stuff. Can we look at the separation of human biology/human nature and ask ourselves what happens when we cut out the reason of human existence for the history of humanity, or even the drive of every living organism to procreate?

There are things that happen to women when they grow and give birth to children. What happens when we remove that? And will governments "fix" the human depopulation crisis the by growing children in vats and having the state raise them?

>And will governments "fix" the human depopulation crisis the by growing children in vats and having the state raise them?

What's your alternative to this problem?

>or even the drive of every living organism to procreate?

Judging by current birthrates in developed nations, that drive isn't very strong in modern humans.

>There are things that happen to women when they grow and give birth to children. What happens when we remove that?

Women lead better lives overall?

We already have government institutions for educating kids, called "schools". We just need to expand these institutions' roles so they including all the parts of housing and raising children until they're adults. It could done far more efficiently than by relying on unpaid volunteers, and paid for with much higher taxes (people won't need money for big houses and raising kids any more when the State takes over this role).

Honestly, I don't see how this solution could possibly be worse than the only viable alternative, which is to simply accept a sharply shrinking population and sit around and wring our hands about how no one wants to have kids any more.

It's almost comically sad, the misalignment of solutions and problems.

>"It sounds like making the solution even worse than the problem."

But then government gets to bend babies any way they like. I hope baby farms will never come to existence.

I don't see how it is anything other than inevitable. Religions, governments, other organizations/entities have a lot of reasons and not all will be prevented from doing so.

The essential problem of modification isn't who is tailoring people, but that anyone at all is tailoring people. It legitimizes the notion that human beings can be made subject to the wills and desires of others in the manner of an instrument. It's the same moral stance that enabled chattel slavery, but worse. Much worse.

The idea is just reheated science fiction, but the underlying hubris, and resulting moral blindness, is even older.

>"but that anyone at all is tailoring people"

From what I know "untailored" people do not develop into anything meaningful on their own.

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