Oh! That beautifully captures my own thinking about this, and I've expanded on that over the years.

For instance, that desire and that decision aren't a guarantee that you will end up having biological children, nor that having them will bring you happiness. Barring medical or financial conditions, there are so many other reasons why one ends up not having them, a lot of them being circumstantial and outside of an individual's control e.g. who gets to cross your path, who becomes your partner, a cultural context, events affecting your family and so on.

That deep emotional and spiritual desire to live and love as a foundational directive, also pushes you to reflect, shape and reshape your personal story and your identity as you move through life. It sparks existential questions to which insights only come through time and the compounding of experience. This is a most deeply individual aspect of living.

In a way, that same desire isn't binary. It's not one or the either. It includes doubt and leaning back and forth between stances depending on one's circumstances and experience. Like a bell curve, some will feel deeply bereft if they remain childless, many will consider that a scenario with a worthwhile alternative for parenthood is just as valid an option to them, and some have a deep sated desire to remain child free.

Reflecting and reconsidering doesn't stop when one has become a parent either. Many will vocally state that parenthood - or remaining without children - was the best thing they did in life, but there are also those that deeply regret their choice. As culture, past and present, tends to emphasis the importance of having children and espouses the merits of parenthood, this is only discussed in a most apprehensive manner, which leads to misguided generalisations and dismissive tropes. This renders an important part of our human condition moot: that personal responsibility is inevitably bounded by constraints which are necessarily outside the control of an individual.

There are many ways to self-actualize that emotional and spiritual desire to live and love, and having and raising biological children is one of many possible pathways. And so, the framework of values and beliefs you've developed which underpins and drives your own personal narrative, doesn't necessarily apply to the lives of anyone else.

But you do not increase the net love of the world. That’s wrong. It’s an emotional decision to be selfish and self-serving and do something that you want to do regardless of whether that child wants to exist. Nothing more. To create life is to create death and so at best neutral but not knowing the quality of that life or that death poses a serious risk that a decision to have children increases the net suffering of the world not love.

Just because you can not be absolutely certain doesn't mean it's a coin toss with both options being equally reasonable. If someone wants to stop existing, they have the power to make that happen, while the converse is not true, thus choosing to assume someone wants to exist is safer. The overwhelming majority of people want to exist and the few who don't tend to be in situations where it easily could have been foreseen that life would be problematic; if you've lived a mostly happy life for a few decades, odds are pretty good that your offspring will do the same, thus statistically choosing to bring someone into the world is far more likely to be what they want.

But going further, the idea that death negates the benefits of life is absurd. If you read a book and are sad when it ends, that means it was a good book, and you are better off for having experienced it. The ending does not annihilate the story, it completes it. And if the story should have some bad writing in it, that may be undesireable, but all the good writing is still there to be enjoyed. No matter how bad life seems to get, the good moments still happened and they can never be taken away from you. Sure we'd all like to avoid unnecessary suffering and postpone death for as long as possible, but only because we would rather fill that time with the joys of life - if you had to choose between experiencing extreme pain periodically or spending the rest of your life in an inescapable coma, you'd certainly choose the former. Non-existance is not a pleasant alternative to life, it is a fate at least as bad as death, if there is any distinction at all.

It's a rational decision.

Ten thousand generations of my ancestors were intelligent, give or take. If they had learned easy+effective contraception at any point, I wouldn't be here at all. This is infinitely more important point than all my ancestor's work, art, grand projects, ambitions, theories and whatnot. Leaving aside pondering about that bug of our genome, the immediate local decision is not to let my genome die with me and to give it yet another generation.

Maybe it's futile because the bug will be fatal in the end. Maybe. I don't know and I don't want to take risks.

I'm unlikely to contribute to AGI in any significant degree after all, which I would consider one of the alternative workaround to the bug.