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One of my friends has decided to have children with the help of a sperm donor and I have taken more than a passing interest in her search. This is actually the 2nd woman in my broader group of acquaintances who have have decided to go it alone. They are both highly educated, but lack the physical attractiveness that would make it possible to lock down the type of man they have been interested in. But while commitment from the right man can be hard to come by, sperm is incredibly cheap. We are taking elite sperm here, like entirely clean bill of health for 2 generations back, model good looks, tall, athletic, pursuing an MD or PHD in STEM, comes from a family of inventors, grandparents who lived to the age of 100 etc. Imagine someone like the Swede in Philip Roths American Pastoral. You can get a vial of this sperm for 1000 USD, and why wouldnt you as a single woman?
Im not entirely convinced that the draw backs of being a single mother in this situation cannot be off-set by the benefits of having this superior genetic material. I have sometimes during this time felt a tad bit guilty for procreating with my partner with our comparatively average genes. Yes, we will probably pass on good intelligence, but what about physical traits and health? Is there anything parental love can provide that can compare to the confidence that comes with being a 190cm athletic, but yet very intelligent young man?
All this has made me wonder if "leftover" educated women will produce the new elite of tomorrow. Surely this is a more efficient way of making superior babies than the pre-implantation embryo testing of the Collinses? https://www.telegraph.co.uk/family/life/pronatalists-save-mankind-by-having-babies-silicon-valley/?
This option is hardly new. You can get free sperm from a hot guy for free at a bar. As long as she isn't absolutely hideous a women should be able to sleep with a top 1% man. Maybe not on the first Friday night, but with a bit of effort, most women should be able to get pregnant with a real hunk.
The real step father is the government who protects, provides and parents the child. This isn't stable, as the people paying the taxes aren't getting the benefits. She wants men to pay taxes but not have any obligations as a wife. The state is a terrible husband. Children to single mothers (mothers married to the state) preform worse on all most all metrics. I find it mindblowing that there are people who have such faith in the system that they believe that the state will provide for them for decades to come. The welfare state is a ponzi scheme funded by debt that clearly isn't meeting its expectations already.
As for good genes this won't work as well either. Good genes is less about having some super mutation and more about not having negative mutations. A person with few harmful mutations and no unusually beneficial ones will be far better off than someone with a mix of stellar and subpar genes. With a rather aesthetically displeasing mother it is likely the child will inherit some unfortunate mutations.
I don't exactly think that the single mothers by choice we're talking about plan to take government benefits...they're well out of that income bracket.
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I think OP is going for the Murphy Brown model of single motherhood (woman can afford to pay $1,000 per vial of sperm) rather than the ordinary single parenting we see for the majority.
Apart from that, I agree that there aren't going to be super babies born out of this.
Unless you can afford a nanny that sounds like a hard life. Taking care of a newborn is tough enough with two people.
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I went to university in norther Europe and in my 6 years of being there I can only remember one guys who had the combo of very nice facial aesthetics, stem PHD level of intelligence, athleticism and above 190 height, and he had an alcoholic father who drank himself to death. I think you are overestimating how many men who are actually this attractive and the ease by which a plain 35 yo woman can have unprotected sex with them.
These women have well paying jobs and often extended family who will help and support them. Im not so sure they will need more government assistance than many other "average" families. Granted we are in Europe where the social safety net is wide and parental leave policies are generous and daycare cheap. But again, this is something that all families benefit from.
"With a rather aesthetically displeasing mother it is likely the child will inherit some unfortunate mutations." Well, by this reasoning they would be much worse off if they would have procreated with their "looksmatch" and the children would have inherited twice the amount of unfortunate mutations.
I know...hmm. maybe one guy that fits this bill, in my medical school class of 150. He's no model, but he's 6'4" and above average looking. If you're willing to allow six-footers, there's another guy.
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The cost of a three bedroom house, the taxes required for school and medical care, plus the insurance to cover if anything were to happen are astronomical. Most people can't do it on two incomes. This has to be done while raising a child, which is immensely time-consuming. Are these women so rich that they can pause their careers and take a long parental leave, or are they dumping their kid in a daycare three weeks after birth? Most people with high incomes are workaholics.
The margins of error are much smaller in a single parent household. If she gets sick, if she dies or if she loses her job there is no good backup plan. There are two grandparents instead of four. There are half as many uncles and cousins.
Which is why we have high taxes and a dysfunctional power grid. The tax money is wasted on being an insurance company for people who make deliberately awful life choices instead of actually achieving things. A government insurance system in which more or less anyone who shows up can take benefits without demands is bound to fail. Insurance companies require people to lock their doors and hire electricians to install wires. Otherwise, they wouldn't last.
Fundamentally we have a major issue with child mortality being low allowing for extreme dysgenics.
That is one hell of a bullet to bite there. That genie is not going to get stuffed back into the bottle, at least not to the extent it was two hundred years ago. African peasants, at least the ones we have half-decent data for, suffer much lower child mortality than kings and queens in the eighteenth century. The germ theory of disease, vaccination, and antibiotics absolutely beat the living shit out of infant and youth mortality. We might lose the second two through civilizational collapse, but even literal illiterate backwoods rednecks in America know that germs cause disease.
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..because of bad genes, not single status.
...ya think they'd agree to that?
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I think you underestimate this point. Even single mothers have baby fathers and even widows have their in-laws who may want to invest in their grandchild. What the OP is describing is even worse, these children are basically born without half of the family with everything that comes with that. Even on material side they will not inherit anything. Additionally, my spidey senses are tingling here, there something dark about a mother making her child as if they were a pet. She wants it, so she purchases it from catalogue.
This is another social experiment that kind of goes under the lid for some time already, and that society did not broadly agreed upon. It has similar vibes to surrogacy. We will deal with the fallout in decades.
Curious — are your thoughts different if a married couple does this if the husband is infertile?
Sure, it is something between adoption and marrying a woman with her own child. I think there are no good options for infertile men even if they do not want to have children themselves.
Adopt a sibling's child? Use a brother's sperm to impregnate the wife?
If you adopt sibling's child or even accept brother as a sperm donor, it may for sure create some awkward family gatherings with your brother literally being biological father of your child and possibly deciding to act on that role. Modern IVF especially combined with surrogacy serves as an endless source of philosophical questions/scenarios in real life - like this controversy where grieving mother paid surrogate to carry child of her dead son. So yes, if "single" mother can select a child from catalougue of sperm donors and we should be fine with that, why cannot let's say rich 70 years old man pay 20 Ukrainian surrogate mothers to deliver large family of children who will inhabit his remote compound in Nebraska?
But back to the topic again, there are no good options for infertile men who want to build relationship with younger and fertile childless woman or any woman who may decide she wants another child in the future.
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This used to be common when people had large families (10+ kids) and when there were extra children lying around. The usual pattern was the youngest child, with perhaps a three or four-year age gap to the older ones. This child was often "gossiped" or given to another relative (often childless). It does not happen anymore. My parents considered this with my youngest sister.
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