Yeah, as much as I don’t want kids, I would. Genetic diversity and all that. I’m young, healthy, and could handle it. And, as another poster said, what else do you have to do?
Here’s what you can do to me…I want to be cryogenically frozen for a couple million years so I can come back and see what kind of creature evolved to become the dominant species. Who knows, maybe there will be some kind of reptile with human-like intelligence?
Without modern medicine, no. Imagine having sick kids without medicine or antibiotics.
Who are they going to catch infectious diseases from?
What if I trade you Tina Turner for one of them? You could start repopulating any time! Nudge nudge! Wink Wink!
Bacteria? Insects? Animals? Water?
Probably one of the few things you can count on is bacteria surviving. Could fall and break a bone or have a cut get infected. If people survived there’s no reason to think insects and rodents havent survived too.
I’ve been snipped too, but that doesn’t mean I have to tell the Hot Survivor Chicks[sup]TM[/sup] does it?
Childhood death rates would climb high, education levels would drop. Teens would be working hard learning a trade or farming. It would be much like how humanity has lived for most of our races time. It would be a terrible, terrible thing, but somehow we made it to the twentieth century and we could have a great jump-start on getting back to modern technology.
Imagine how much could be gained by just scavenging. We just have to hope the most people will work towards rebuilding and not turn into the angry cannibalistic mobs of bad movies and books.
Even if just 1% of humanity remained, there should be a vast pool of skills and knowledge. One good Library contains enough knowledge to start rebuild civilization. One Navy ship contains the tech manuals to build a completely modern steam cycle driven power system for a town. We could run steam-powered generators on wood, coal, oil or diesel. None of this would be too tough and there are still a lot of driveway mechanics that could pick up the pieces and help build or rebuild a power plant. Clean Water might be a bigger problem at first, but drilling wells and catching rainwater hardly takes hi-tech.
We might be able to get some trucks running for a while, tractors, etc.
The food supply might be critical. Even with the loss of modern fertilizers and pesticides, we know far more about organic farming and proper crop rotation than we did even 100 years ago. A few good books should put us on the road to recovery. I imagine that vast herds of feral cattle will eventually roam the plains of grass, replacing the earlier buffalo.
There are plenty of horses around still. We could go back to horse powered vehicles. This time around, we would already know about bicycles, a great invention that is only a little over 100 years old.
I doubt it would be too tough to get some rails running again.
Medicine would be a big one. I am not sure how to get this back up to speed. However, transmission of many would decrease with greatly reduced travel. Malaria would probably make a come back, but we know far more about preventing malaria and disease even without modern medicine than anyone did in 1800 or even 1900. Our knowledge of cleanliness and sanitation would reduce the chance of suffering vast plagues as we did in the past.
People would die and people would live. Life expectancy would drop. The chance of surviving to five would be greatly reduced and people would get use to it again. There would be a great reduction in obesity and probably cigarette smoking. Drinking and pot smoking would possibly increase. We would not be worried about trans-fats anymore.
Humanity could easily recover and in less than a century be most of the way back, but with far less humans burdening the eco-system of the world.
There would be attempts to organize back into civilization all over the world, many pockets of hopes. Some would fail and many would succeed. It would not take to long to get some radio communication between groups. Travel by boat and horse will allow groups to reconnect.
My greatest fear would be wanna be dictator trying to reunite a vast region by force. It would take away from the ability to recover. Seventy Million people scatter across the world should be plenty to rebuild from and I would want to try to be part of the rebuilding.
Jim
Who you calling “reptilian?”
Oh, wait. You said “human-like intelligence.”
Never mind.
Say this happens within the next five to ten years and they’ve created the artificial womb and have improved screening embryos for genetic disorders, yeah I’d probably do it.
We’d need the artifical wombs for mass production, of course.
Otherwise, no. If my extended family is any indicator I’d likely as not produce smart, funny, quite possibly redheaded kids, many of whom would be mentally ill or have lovely things like crohn’s disease, spina bifida, diabetes, psoriasis and so on.
I’ll be good, I promise! 
I’d want to survive, simply because I’d want to see what happens next.
To answer the OP, I’m not sure if I’d want to breed or not. I certainly wouldn’t feel an *obligation *to do so. I don’t feel compelled to see to it that humanity survives. If it does, it does. If it doesn’t, well, another species will come along one of these days.
I’d certainly be more prepared than most people for survival. Working in a museum has taught me all sorts of “pioneer” skills. I know how to prepare food from scratch and preserve it, as well as how to make candles and cloth and things like that. (Though likely making cloth wouldn’t be something that was needed.)
If it did, I’d still be somehwhat okay. I’m also familiar with primitive birth control techniques and which plants around here have contraceptive properties. (Sure, not as reliable as modern birth control, but using a combination of methods, a woman has a lot better a chance of not getting pregant than using nothing at all.)
I agree with you about the education, but I’m not so sure that childhood death rates would skyrocket. First of all, a good portion of the high childhood deaths in the “old days” were linked to diseases caused by a lack of sanitation. That wouldn’t really be an issue. Nor would communicable disease be a real problem since the population would be so low. As long as parents were cautious enough to keep children away from physical dangers like fires and predators, there’s no reason to think that the death rates for children would climb high. They would probably be higher than now, of course, but I don’t think we’d go back to the 50% death rate of some eras. We know too much about sanitation, nutrition and the like for that to happen.
“For a while” being the operative term. Gasoline and diesel go bad after a while. You’ve got six months to a year before all of the processed fuel is unusuable. If you want to rely on internal combustion engines, you’re going to have to get the refineries functioning again.
A coal-fired power plant isn’t all that difficult to operate, since it’s mostly automatic. You’ve just got to know which buttons to push-- not simple, by any means, but well within the grasp of a few intelligent people.
I’m approaching my mid-40s. My eggs are aging, and diminishing, rapidly – so, it’s unlikely.
I was speaking more in terms of knowing that there used to be a cure for whatever illness they had but being unable to do anything about it.
I also agree with Magnetout on this one. I wouldn’t be upset to lean that humanity died out either.
I for one for would be happy to put my mad impregnation skillz to the service of humanity. Up with people!
If there was an OB to deliver them. I have BIG babies and had a c-section last time, so I would need some medical assistance - but why not?
I love being a momma - most of the time 
Not a fan of kids myself, so i’d pass, humans are just another animal anyway, nothing special about us
besides, who’d want to inheret my pasty white, easily sunburnt, flat-footed, lactose-inolerant, astigmatism/nearsighted genes…
Me? Not a chance.
Me, Scarlett Johansson, Eva Longoria, Ziyi Zhang, Beyoncé, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Sarah Silverman and Neve Campbell? Sure, why not… 
Add “lifelong problem with depression,” and you’ve just described me to a T!
I’m missing something. An asteroid strike wouldn’t destroy that much infrastructure. Worst case scenario the US takes a Texas-sized asteriod right in, well, Texas. Wipes out most of the population of the US immediately, puffs up clouds of vaporized redneck which chokes the majority of the rest of the world. Europe, Japan, etc. would have more than enough industrial capacity to sustain the remaining population in first-world comfort. Medical care and pharmacuticals would take a major hit(pardon the pun) but I don’t see much which could regress humanity back to pre-industrial revolution state, especially if we suddenly had billions and billions less people to provide for. All we’d have to do is figure out how to operate the machinery and communicate with each other and we’d be fine. Sad and pissed, but the race would survive, perhaps even prosper in the long run.
C02 emissions and pollution levels would drop overnight. Oil supplies would suddenly be plentiful, the survivors could re-build in a more environmentally friendly way. Large advances were made in Europe after the Black Plague and some speculation has been advanced as to the lessening of population pressure as being a factor in the growth of academic and social achievement. There would be plenty of ready-made everything but perishables for decades. Just re-locate the survivors to industrialized regions and grow from there. The psychological effects and the merging of the cultures of the survivors would be a bigger challenge IMHO. Getting survivors to breed would be the LEAST of your worries.
Enjoy,
Steven