Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

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This is a topic near and dear to my heart, because unwanted children leads to enormous suffering (which I have seen up close as a volunteer Guardian ad Litem, a legal advocate for children in the system). A recent thread on the topic of unwanted children at scale [1].

So I bought and operate a domain which points to the r/childfree subreddit wiki list of doctors [2] who will provide permanent birth control to people who want it without onerous conditions such as partner approval, being over 30, or having at least two or three kids first. I run marketing campaigns on socials with this digital property. Next steps are building a site to act as a "store locator" app for this data. My partner and I also contribute in r/sterilization for those seeking permanent birth control, helping folks navigate insurance (bisalps in the US are free under most insurance situations, and vasectomies are covered at 100% in 10 states) and logistics.

High level, we should collectively be robustly supporting parents who want to be parents, but we must aggressively assist though who would rather not. 40% of US domestic pregnancies every year are unintended [3]. ~600k children are in the foster care system [4], very roughly half of which are adoptable but are never adopted. It costs ~$310k to raise a child from 0-18 in the US [5], and this does not include daycare or college costs.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40053774

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/childfree/wiki/doctors

[3] https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/unintended-pregnancy-u...

[4] https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-kids-are-in-foster-ca...

[5] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Brookin...

I think it would be cool to know your main digital property or some other way to connect - so folk who want to help could reach out.

Bandaid solutions to societal ills probably just prolong the suffering.

On the contrary, this is a pipeline problem. If you get to the root of the problem by avoiding unwanted children, the effort to paper over the suffering in the future is never needed. Society ain't changing on any meaningful timeline (based on all available evidence), "the purpose of the system is what it does," so attack the root cause in earnest.

It is a choice to not actively solve for the suffering, so find an inexpensive point of leverage to attempt to solve for it. Folks seeking this healthcare are being marginalized by the system at great cost realized as externalities, and therefore require empowerment (with strong positive second order effects). Like vaccinations, prevention is far cheaper than the alternatives.

Tangentially, it's kind of wild to think that the global population boom, billions of people, over the last ~100 years was because of women not being empowered [1], broadly speaking. Because as soon as women are empowered [2], educated, and have robust access to contraceptives, boom, fertility rate plummets off a cliff. Turns out, society (economic pyramid schemes leading to pearl clutching about rapidly declining populations) and men [3] [4] want more children than women do. Ergo, we must empower the human, because all available evidence demonstrates the system is built and operated to subjugate rather than empower (from a first principles systems analysis).

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40982392 (citations)

[3] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/women-children-study-1.711984...

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/20/paid-paternity...

A society that doesn't support having children won't lead anywhere worth going.

I'm pretty sure that given the support they needed, and a society that didn't program them all the way to want other things in life more; the numbers would look very different.

And that IS the long term problem.

Which is not at all an excuse for not solving other problems, I don't feel it has to be one or the other.

Society very much has, and is, changing; drastically, exponentially. And in an increasingly destructive direction for quite a while now.

And it will have to change into something more constructive, humane, rational; if it wants to survive at all.

Indeed, society can fix the system if it so chooses. Otherwise, it must make peace with rational actors making rational decisions in an irrational and dysfunctional system. In my small acts, I am gifting agency and freedom. Society is free to make a better offer (I wish it would), but we know it won't.

Prof Scott Galloway asks, "Do we love our children? [1]" I can prove that we don't, beyond a shadow of a doubt. It is clear as day.

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/scott_galloway_how_the_us_is_destr...

I'm curious how you would prove it? The biggest indictment of humanity to me is our destruction of the biosphere for future generations (and at the rate we're going, a few current generations as well).

Is it that or something else?

I can enumerate the long list of policy that treats youth as a resource to extract from vs supporting and enabling their success. Is that what you had in mind for this?

No need to enumerate the list; I can imagine rather a lot of it, and it probably isn't limited to youth, but they're usually the least able to deal with those who would extract from them.

But I still think the largest indictment of humanity is our failure to care for our home. Buckminster Fuller gave us the idea of "Starship Earth"; that we are all the crew of a spaceship that winds through the galaxy and we must all cooperate to maintain it for those that come after. It seems almost certain now that we will not make it.

Then it will be replaced by something more suitable, like many times before.

Once you drift too far away from basic human needs and the truth, something will happen, and we're more or less there if you ask me.

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