Re:Car Seats as Contraception (2020)
by pjc50 on Wednesday August 17, 2022 @11:21AM
(#32497559)
> So I think it might be okay for these births to be avoided to save these lives?
The deaths are involuntary. The choice not to have another birth is voluntary. This matters rather a lot, since a lot of the 20th century was spent arguing that contraception should be allowed at all on this basis. Maximising for number of people without considering their crowding leads to squalor, and legalizing and promulgating contracaption across the world has been one of the great liberating stories of the past 100 years.
Now that women have choice, the situation becomes an economic one. If having more people around matters to you economically: you have to make it economically sensible for people to have children. Increasingly there's a cost of living crisis for everyone, and children are a subset of "everyone" that can't make their own income.
Russia hands you a medal if you have lots of children; the UK cuts off child benefit after the second child, as part of an explicit "people shouldn't have children they can't afford" policy. I wonder if anyone added up the "births avoided" of the latter.
The deaths are involuntary. The choice not to have another birth is voluntary. This matters rather a lot, since a lot of the 20th century was spent arguing that contraception should be allowed at all on this basis. Maximising for number of people without considering their crowding leads to squalor, and legalizing and promulgating contracaption across the world has been one of the great liberating stories of the past 100 years.
Now that women have choice, the situation becomes an economic one. If having more people around matters to you economically: you have to make it economically sensible for people to have children. Increasingly there's a cost of living crisis for everyone, and children are a subset of "everyone" that can't make their own income.
Russia hands you a medal if you have lots of children; the UK cuts off child benefit after the second child, as part of an explicit "people shouldn't have children they can't afford" policy. I wonder if anyone added up the "births avoided" of the latter.