Yeah, but probably way lower cost to create some embryos with “fresh” eggs than later ones. Especially if you consider all the indirect costs of using older eggs, like the increased chances of various abnormalities.
You’d obviously only do it if there’s some reasonable belief that you’re going to have kids later. But being able to delay the actual kid is a significant benefit.
Maybe egg harvesting tech can be improved. Lots of medical procedures have been made dramatically less invasive over time. Surely there is some room for improvement.
Trouble is, it’s hard to find a way to make use of this effect (unless you are actually trying to encourage teen pregnancy). Bribing one women in a friend group to have a baby might encourage the others, but it’s hardly practical.
I wasn’t counting that at all. My friend is relatively young and her eggs were “fresh”. She said the doctors were surprised how many healthy embryos they got, because most women who do this do have issues with their eggs, not with their womb. In fact, most older women who seek fertility treatment have perfectly functional wombs.
The woman needs to take all kinds of drugs to prompt the ovaries to over-produce eggs. It’s unpleasant and carries some health risks, both immediate and long-term. Then she needs to have an invasive procedure. The whole process takes months and is very costly.
Societal doomerism. I forgot climate change is a culture war issue in America. It should be possible to impress upon kids the importance of solving and mitigating the effects of climate change without convincing them that it is inevitably going to lead to the end of civilization. The doomer mentality is counterproductive anyway, people won’t make an effort unless they believe their efforts can make a difference.
Education. Sure. I think the ‘extended childhood’ is a significant part of of the problem, though. It’s potentially a double whammy as it also increases the time children are dependent on their parents.
Housing. YIMBYs do seem to be getting somewhere in America, so this may be changing. I think this and several of the other issues facing potential parents are a result of the current demographic imbalance: older people are change- and risk-averse, care more about short term problems, and they don’t benefit from the disruption of new developments - but they now form a much larger part of the electorate than young people. Bringing in working age immigrants to make up for the ‘missing’ younger people exacerbates this issue, because they compete for housing and services but can’t vote for pro-growth policies that would increase them.
Childrearing I don’t think this is just about childcare. It’s a K vs r problem. Expected parental investment has increased to such a degree that it’s putting people off having more or any children. Partly this is a cultural issue, and partly fear of downward mobility for children, and both of those are hard to solve.
Already replied to.
Reproductive technology
Yes. I would have had at least one more child if I could. We ought to fix the societal issues that are causing people to delay having kids, but extending the time would also help. IVF should be free for everyone who needs it in every country, like it is in Israel.
Yes, I’ve heard it’s notably unpleasant. What we need is a way to create new eggs from stem cells. That would solve a lot of fertility problems and also allow effective embryo selection which would reduce the risk of inherited conditions (this was a concern for us in having a child, but we decided to take the risk in the end).
All of Europe and much of East Asia are well below replacement. Britain has had sub-replacement fertility for 50 years, and it’s nowhere close to 2.1. All those countries should be trying to increase birthrates, not only because it would be sad to see them disappear or change beyond all recognition, but also because otherwise, we are going to see more unscrupulous regimes try a lot of unpleasant and coercive things to force women to have more children.
Yes, it would be great for gay couples who want kids. Avoids the ethical issues of surrogacy, and means they could have a child they are both genetically related to. Then scientists just need to find a way to create sperm in a lab to address male infertility, and allow the same for lesbians.
There was actually a lesbian couple in one of my antenatal classes, I think they used a sperm donor.
Egg fusion already exists. I don’t think it’s done for humans due to ethical concerns, but of artificial wombs, creating eggs from stem cells, and creating viable embryos from two eggs, I’d guess that egg fusion could be done soonest. I say could rather than will because sperm are cheap, men drive an awful lot of societal direction, and i don’t think there’s a ton of money interested in developing human egg fusion.
Isn’t the issue imprinting? That certain genes are inactivated in the DNA of egg cells and others in sperm cells, and lacking the products of these genes or getting a double dose disrupts development and makes the resulting embryo unviable. Or have they found a way to get around this and it’s just not reliable enough to try in humans?
We really need more investment in fertility research. Unfortunately, the current US government have been cutting funding everywhere.
We are farther along with cloning than with egg fusion. But it looks like someone managed to grow a mouse from two eggs, with a lot is fiddling, and that mouse grew up to bear a litter of mice. Despite the title, they seem to have used two eggs, not one.
Not advocating for this, but removing all government supported retirement programs & benefits (social security, medicare for 65+, etc.) would provide an incentive for people to have enough children to support them financially in retirement, as well as incentivize grandparents to continue to live in the same house as their children and provide childcare.
Aside from rolling back feminism I’m not sure what can be fixed. The fact is that the woman pays a much greater cost for pregnancy than the man. Even when the father is extremely dedicated, the mother has more career disruption. And this isn’t (just) sexism, it’s the real-world effect of not being at the job or only partially there for a significant period. Even if you try to put your finger on the scale when it comes to pay, etc., you’ll never fix the effects on experience, professional relationships, and so on.
But these effects are more muted at age 40. A woman that invested her time into her career rather than child-rearing is now well established and probably makes good money. She can afford, in time, money, and career, to raise kids. But biologically, it’s too late for many.
In a sense, this is just a function of modernity. Women have kids when they can support them. In the distant past, when there was no education or anything else, that was basically the instant that they could get pregnant. That age has gone up over time as society got more complex. Now the age is surpassing the biological cutoff.
Now that I managed to read it, I think what they did was fuse a normal mature ovum with an undeveloped oocyte taken from a newborn mouse. Using the undeveloped oocyte avoids the maternal imprinting process that normally downregulates key genes during oocyte development, but it doesn’t provide the paternal imprinting that downregulates other key genes. To make up for that, they got the undeveloped oocytes from mice with a mutation in one of the key genes, which would somewhat replicate the effect of paternal imprinting (I wonder how these mutant mice survive and develop themselves - perhaps they are all heterozygous and male mice are able to pass it on to their offspring without negatively affecting development?).
It’s clever, but it isn’t going to allow two ordinary adult females to reproduce together. And yeah, with 371 embryos transferred, 28 pups of which only 8 were born alive and only 2 lived a significant length of time, it would be extremely unethical to try something like this in humans.
Advocate or not, these benefits are surely going to be significantly cut in the future, because with a top-heavy population they just aren’t affordable. Governments are already raising the retirement age. The UK government is currently trying to bring in assisted dying, probably partly for the same reason.
I made some suggestions earlier: reduce time spent in education, and make housing more affordable so people can settle down earlier. That would help a little.
You don’t have to tell me; I’m living it right now. This is where financial support might actually help - having kids negatively affects how much money you’ll make in your lifetime, and if you want women to have more of them, it shouldn’t.
It’s a pity humans were patrilocal; if we were matrilocal this probably wouldn’t be an issue. But then again, in some ways a too-low birthrate is a good problem to have. LSLGuy said:
But it would be so much worse if reproducing was cheap and easy for humans. We’d never have got out of the Malthusian trap, and instead of the current debate, we’d probably be asking whether people should be involuntarily sterilised to prevent more suffering.
It would help, though I’d say it’s adjacent to the career problem.
Regarding housing specifically, here’s a wildly unpopular suggestion: eliminate any property tax discounts for seniors. Prop 13 in CA and anything that allows older people to pay less property tax.
But you’ll kick seniors out of the houses they’ve been in for decades! Yes, that’s the whole point. Seniors are living in giant, empty houses they bought to occupy their kids. They don’t need those houses anymore and should move out so someone with a family can move in. But they have no incentive to do so because of the property tax situation in many states. End this.
Yeah, strictly speaking the problem is not just with seniors. Some property tax proposals target them specifically, though, and since they’re on fixed/limited income they aren’t as resilient to increases. But of course, getting them to move is the whole point. That’s irreconcilable with a tax system that gives seniors breaks so they can stay in the place they’ve been in.
The issue with that is that all they have to do is look at the news to see that “solving and mitigation” isn’t going to happen. Solving is almost certainly already off the table, and it’s blatantly obvious that mitigation won’t be permitted to happen for an indefinite period.
And the same goes for all sorts of other environmental, resource, infrastructure and social issues. They are headed towards disaster, and going to come to some sort of head in the next few decades, and there’s effectively zero chance of doing anything about it. Any children born now are going to be the ones who reap the whirlwind, after the ones making the decisions and enjoying the benefits are dead. And all that looking into the issues will do is confirm that.
So, what are we supposed to do about it? Lie? Tell them to have kids and not worry about how much they’ll suffer?
