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Seems unworkable because while the process and technology is sound, the main barrier is individual lack of planning. Suppose you made IVF 100% subsidized and free, you still have to convince young women to undergo an invasive surgical procedure. Many women would probably delay it until it was too late to be worth doing. Countries like Israel which make heavy use of IVF have religious-cultural-social pressure for young women to bear children, so the women are more likely to freeze their eggs early.
Still, there would be some takers for free or partially subsidized IVF. Just need to convince the voting public it is worth the cost, a benefit for future generations that will not generate direct benefits for them.
Young women, the demographic known to be particularly fond of cosmetic surgery? Hmm..
The easiest answer is to
bribepay them. I expect plenty of takers if it's a $10k one-off, with heavy government encouragement.As far as I can tell, my proposal involves less demanding all-encompassing public propaganda or government intervention than any alternative I can name. Is it a perfect solution? Of course not, but praying away cratering TFRs might be cheap and also wouldn't work.
Well, I'd vote for $10k subsidies, but good luck to any politican who tries to get the public behind it. There would probably be serious opposition from women too old to benefit from it, and it would be reframed as a form of neo-patriarchal enslavement of wombs.
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It's no longer a technological solution and has become a social and political problem, so you're kind of back where you began.
Why not cut out the middleman and pay them $10k for their first baby, no IVF required? Or $10k for each baby born before whatever cut-off age where IVF becomes relevant. There's a few dials you can adjust there and it seems like less government involvement and propaganda required than adding in the IVF step.
I wish to note that my proposal is not mutually exclusive with anything you've said.
What differentiates $10k for egg-harvesting from a direct reward for natality?
So the real target for my proposal are people who want kids, but have a tendency to postpone things till it's way too late. At that point, having eggs preserved (preferably from way earlier) would be an absolute godsend. To contrast, if they wanted to get the $10k for the child then, it's far more likely that it's too late. That's true regardless of how badly they want the kids.
The benefit of the wider embryo-selection policy is that avoids or minimizes dysgenic effects. Even if $10k means a lot more to the poor, you can still screen and select for the higher quality potential children. Conveniently, the same markers that promise general good health also correlate positively with IQ. Follow the LW link for a better exploration of that point. You don't even need to do the politically difficult thing of actively selecting for IQ, you can just say you want healthier kids (by pretty standard definitions of health) and get IQ points as a happy little accident.
And even if there's no embryo selection? Well, at least we have good eggs for the IVF. That should make a difference. There's plenty of other things you could reasonably try, but I'm not writing a policy whitepaper here.
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