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I've previously posted on the Motte about the Swedish state-funded Investigative Committee For a Future with Children (Swed. Utredningen för en framtid med barn) with instructions to look into the recent decline in fertility and suggest solutions to the problem. The fourth report dropped a few weeks back, this time focusing on involuntary childlessness and infertility: “Involuntary childlessness: prevalence, causes, treatment and consequences” As before, here's a link in case you know Swedish or want to use an AI to give you the uptake. https://framtidmedbarn.se/rapport/nr-4-ofrivillig-barnloshet-forekomst-orsaker-behandling-och-konsekvenser/
In contrast to the other three reports previously released, this one actually got some major government attention, and shorly after it was made public an extra investment into fertility treatments was announced. That's all well and good, and I'm sure it will help suffering couples – but I am also increasingly worried that the committee is losing the thread. These last two reports (the previous of which focused on economic differences between different family formations) have deftly dodged all the bigger questions at play in this crisis. Biologically-related infertility is obviously an exceedingly small cause of declining fertility, and in any serious discussion it must be pretty far down the list of priorities. I get the feeling this particular issue is getting a whole report's worth of attention not because it's key to a solution, but because it's conveninent and doesn't involve questioning anyone's life choices by wrestling with difficult and dangerous questions.
One of the difficult and dangerous questions I've wrestled with recently is a particular form of dissonance. It might surprise a few of you, but Sweden actually has an extensive Total Defense Duty (yes, literal translation) technically applicable to all Swedish citizens between the age of 16 and 70. Everyone and their grandma really is expected to make significant sacrifices, perhaps even give their lives, in the event of war. In the information pamphlet the government regularly sends out to facilitate crisis-preparation there's a classic mantra (in the more literal Sanskrit meaning of that noun, man-tra, i.e. support or instrument for the mind) that I think has been included since centuries back – alla uppgifter om att motståndet ska upphöra är falska – all reports that resistance is to cease are false. Liberty or death. Noble stuff!
Yet the most central part of ensuring the continued existence of a sovereign Swedish state, i.e. the creation of a new generation of Swedes, is apparently not even a moral, let alone a legal, duty on the part of the citizen? Everyone is expected to die fighting the Russians, but it's wholly acceptable to make choices whose aggregate consequences ends with Sweden going the way of the Dodo? That old Goldfinger-line pops into my head. "You expect me to have children?" "No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!" Really, what is the point of this gung-ho never-surrender sentiment, and for that matter all the increases in defence spending in Europe, if we're just going to allow death to conquer us all from within? There are ideas here which should be connected, yet they seem to lie strewn all about in disorder in a way that's both frustrating and disheartening to see.
Apart from that, I'm also not entirely sure unreservedly making it even easier to postpone getting children is truly the right way to approach this problem. Unpopular though it might be among certain cohorts to point out, the solution to declining fertility reasonably also should somehow involve convincing women to have children while they're still young; not enabling every pregnancy to be geriatric.
In short, the material focus in the debate is starting to worry me. I hope that the next reports will be a bit meatier and tackle the larger cultural and ideological questions at play.
I'm not going to get into the whole cultural debate around declining TFR or putative causes. I am painfully pragmatic, and what I intend to demonstrate is that there is a technological solution to the problem (the best kind of solution, mwah):
A country as wealthy as Sweden can circumvent the dysgenic concerns raised by @sleepyegg through embryo selection. The primary costs are the IVF itself, which should be in the realm of affordability for the middle class and above (who suffer disproportionately from reduced TFR). If not, I think any sane government should be willing to spend enormous sums of money to prevent population collapse.
You can screen for a lot of things, including strong proxies for health/mutational load. The screening itself is a trivial fraction of the cost compared to the egg extraction, freezing and IVF, and as mentioned it's the IVF that's the costly part.
Further, implantation success rates are remarkably stable even for older women. It's the age of the ova itself that matters, someone using eggs they harvested at 25 when they're in their late 30s is way more likely to succeed (for a given number of cycles) than that person using recently harvested eggs.
In other words, the uterus can handle things just fine for a very long time. The eggs continue to degrade the longer they stay in the ovary. You're already born with all the eggs you'll ever have if you're a woman, or as man, though that depends on when you last went to the supermarket. The success rate for implantation or the dysgenic effects of mutational load on the viability or overall health of the eggs/children increase precipitously once you're in your 30s. It's no coincidence that the risk of Down syndrome shoots up with increasing maternal age around that time.
The problem is, of course, that few governments have crossed the minimum sanity threshold to do these things. The fruit couldn't hang much lower without already being in the dirt.
Recommended reading:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dxffBxGqt2eidxwRR/the-optimal-age-to-freeze-eggs-is-19
As a matter of fact, I would strongly recommend everything GeneSmith has ever written on the topic. I'd trust him to smith my genes, or those of my children.
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.
Guys, have you ever spoken to any women about how many kids they want to have, if they want to have kids, and why don't they want ten kids like their grandmothers' generation?
Any of you men who are not circumcised, would you get circumcised for $10k? Remembering, before you go "yeah sure why not?" that there is an anti-circumcision movement and plenty of men who are even going through expensive surgery to restore the foreskin (or at least an ersatz one) because of the perceived disadvantages?
Would you undergo circumcision for any money if it was a repeated operation?
It's not just "pay 24 year old Mandii to have a baby", it's that women even today still will be responsible for the majority of the childcare on top of looking after the house and holding down a job (even a part-time job). Men will be dissatisfied if their wife isn't feeling ready for as much sex after having a baby. Men will leave because "you pay more attention to the kids than me". This isn't simply "blame men for being selfish", it's complicated problems of intimacy, biology, societal structures, and the rest of it.
Put yourself into those shoes: you are now the person who goes back to work after maternity leave (only now we're saying paternity leave). You have a young baby to take care of, and to arrange that they are being taken care of while you work. If there's any problems, you are the one gets the phone call at work to sort it out. You are the one doing the lion's share of the child-minding and housework, even if your spouse is sympathetic and helpful. If you have a couple of kids, you are the one managing schedules around parent-teacher meetings, birthdays, extracurricular activities, taking time off to bring them to the dentist/doctor, whose salary is going towards paying childcare. Oh, and your partner still expects intimacy on a regular basis and will leave if they feel neglected. Do you think your current life and job as the man of the house can change around to accommodate all that? Would you change around to accommodate all that?
Try imagining being a mother and see how much of that life you want to devote to having four kids, when you could be "one and done" or even none, or put it off till you're forty and established in life.
Plenty of young women want children though. They just postpone it as they want to focus their early and mid twenties on partying, travelling, and education. Only to realise too late that finding a lover worth starting a family with is much harder than expected and can easily take years. Suddenly they find themselves in their mid thirties where pregnancy and childbirth is much more risky and their fertility lowers year by year.
I imagine this is the group @self_made_human is trying to cater to. Pay them to freeze their eggs while they are still young, so that they are more likely to still be able to get pregnant once they feel ready to start a family.
Considering that children is something they actually want, and supposing that this makes it significantly more likely, I could easily imagine that a lot of young women would actually be okay with this.
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Why yes, I've had this conversation with my serious partners. The answer ranged between 0 and 3, with the modal value being 2.
Any money? Like, how much money we talking about here? I'd do it for $250k, maybe even $100k. Hell, if they were pretty reasonable and made sure I was well anesthesized, I'd do for it much less. Presuming the foreskin grew back, and this isn't just the equivalent of removing my dick with a cheese grater. I would charge at least a few hundred million dollars for that.
Sadly this must remain a hypothetical, since I was circumcised for medical reasons, and I didn't even get paid for it.
The biggest problem with the rest of your arguments is that they're emotive/rhetorical, not numerate or quantitative.
How many men? How often? Ballpark figures, even? Because lurid anecdotes are not a good argument.
At the end of the day, I'm a weak policy pro-natalist. I do not make it a general point of going around ordering women to have kids. I think the government should encourage people to have more kids, for a form of encouragement that is closer to an anti-smoking campaign than it is to a breeding camp. Personally? I simply wouldn't marry a lady who didn't want to have kids, and I am perfectly willing to make the sacrifices necessary to support them. No hypocrisy here.
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