Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most

Re:Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Pric... by toasterlovin on Tuesday June 12, 2018 @11:08AM (#17293930)

When thinking about having children and about the level of care and attention you’ll be able to give them, I think it’s useful to have the right comparison in mind. If you’re considering having another child, that child’s choices are not between your limited time and attention on the one hand and, on the other, parents who can shower them with time and attention. Instead, the alternative to your limited time and attention is never getting to be alive.

When you frame things that way, the answer for parents who are considering another child is pretty much always to give the child the gift of life. In the developed world, at least.

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Re:Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Pric... by ck425 on Tuesday June 12, 2018 @11:18AM (#17294069)

Life isn't automatically good!!! Bad parenting can, and does, create lives that are arguably better to have never existed.

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Re:Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Pric... by toasterlovin on Tuesday June 12, 2018 @11:48AM (#17294389)

I think it’s pretty patronizing to make this choice for other people. IMO, there’s only one person whose moral right it is to decide whether a life is worthwhile. And that’s the person whose life it is.

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Re:Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Pric... by ck425 on Tuesday June 12, 2018 @11:53AM (#17294473)

No there's not, because one lifeform's existed can effect others. Additionally when debating if life should come to be, the lifeform in question can't have an opinion until after the fact.

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Re:Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Pric... by toasterlovin on Tuesday June 12, 2018 @12:32PM (#17294913)

Think about the kind of life you think would have been better off not existing. Surely there are people alive whose life fits your criteria. Now imagine telling one of these people that it would have been better if they never existed.

Probably they'll tell you where you can stick your notions.

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Re:Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Pric... by ck425 on Tuesday June 12, 2018 @05:33PM (#17298237)

I'm not suggesting someone goes and tells them, that would just cause more pain. I'm suggesting we stop that life from existing in the first place.

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Re:Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Pric... by toasterlovin on Tuesday June 12, 2018 @07:39PM (#17299043)

If you have other reasons for not wanting a life to exist, that’s another matter. But if your only reason is that, in your estimation, that person would have a life not worth living, that seems awfully presumptuous. Life is optional. Let them decide if they want to be alive.

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Re:Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Pric... by CalRobert on Wednesday June 13, 2018 @06:12AM (#17301766)

"is never getting to be alive."

I suppose we may differ on this but I don't really view that as a negative. I don't think there's a pool of "potential people" from which we draw when making a new person. An infinite number of beings don't exist, and won't. I actually would love to see more work on the nature of consciousness and the self, and what exactly gives a new foetus or baby its awareness of the fact that it exists.

And yet I'm not entirely consistent internally because even though "I want someone to hang out with when I'm old" is part of the reason kids sound fun, most of it is "bringing a new being capable of experience joy into the universe", so I guess I sort of agree, in a roundabout sense.

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Re:Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Pric... by mkirklions on Tuesday June 12, 2018 @01:30PM (#17295618)

>the alternative to your limited time and attention is never getting to be alive.

Eh, if anyone should have kids, it should be the financially well off and educated people.

Remember that your logic isnt going to stop impoverished people from having 4 kids and welfare.

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Re:Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Pric... by toasterlovin on Tuesday June 12, 2018 @07:44PM (#17299068)

Yeah, you and I might not want impoverished people from having kids that they can't afford (since guilt will compel us to step in and assist). But I would bet that 99 out of 100 people who grew up in the worst kind of poverty would happily do so again rather than never have existed. So, from the child's point of view it's a good tradeoff.

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