Ask HN: Would this idea help address declining populations in many countries?
If couples find that parenting isn't for them (e.g., within the first year of their baby's life), they would be able to place the baby for adoption easily and without stigma.
Would this encourage more couples to have children?
This is a topic near and dear to my heart, I have a startup I’m bootstrapping to pay people who don’t want kids to not have them. “We buy unwanted fertility.” This covers their out of pocket costs for the healthcare needed to affirm their reproductive choice.
The data is robust that some don’t want children out of economic reasons, and others don’t want them out of lifestyle choices (prioritizing self over a thankless job). Across several national pro natalist policy programs, the evidence shows that even when enormous amounts of benefits are provided, it barely moves the realized fertility outcome.
(40% of pregnancies in the US and internationally, annually, are unintentional, and we have enough humans we don’t take care of already [1], we should be radically empowering as many as people who don’t want to have kids to not have them)
There's a lot to be gained from using the lens of push and pull factors. Device addiction notwithstanding there is a much higher expectation of parental time investment into modern childrearing than before and better advertising of childfree life trajectories, both of which are poor for natalism.
One thing I've never had the datasets to work with to do is to just make a scatterplot of US counties by fertility vs median home square footage, and I think analyzing such a relationship is a missed opportunity.
There are plenty of not for profits - including Planned Parenthood available. It’s not just about providing abortions. Unfortunately, even in states where abortion is not allowed or performed by Planned Parenthood, the Supreme Court just made it legal for states to forbid people on Medicaid from going to planned parenthood which is often the only place available for them to get contraceptives free and cheaply and counseling.
Consider: the government pays a salary to each married family while they raise children; the salary would be equivalent to a blue-collar job, and it would scale with the number of children up to a point (e.g. 4 kids).
I strongly believe that'd lead to many more marriages and childbirths. Many people not interested in raising kids would prefer it over a "regular" job. Families with adoptive children would also be paid, so it could decrease adoption difficulty and stigma as a side-effect.
However, some people will game this policy, and it would be very expensive to implement.
Brazil have something like that: Up to 4 children, you get about 1/4 of the minimum pay from the government for each. There are some caveats, though: The children must be in school, they can't fail a year, children which reach adult age (18) do not count/get paid for anymore, and the family monthly salary can't exceed about 75% of the minimum pay[1] to be eligible.
While this somewhat help lower paid families, we still have a huge number of men that just leave their families once kids appears and leave a single mother to raise the kids -- which have their own issues.
[1] I may be a bit off in the values, but you get the idea.
So who exactly is going to pay for this when the US already won’t be able to meet its obligations for social security and Medicare in less than 10 years? Shouldn’t we be prioritizing universal healthcare, affordable pre-K, etc first before we start subsidizing more kids coming into the world?
That's one way to think about numbers and not about the persons.
I believe most of countries have orphanages already -- and what you're suggesting already exists in some countries (I do believe we still have that in Brazil).
While that could increase the number of people, orphanages are not great places to raise a child (with rare exceptions). Imagine you growing up with a large group of other child, and nobody actually take the time to take care of you. What kind of person would you be today?
Is it to much to ask for to plan and imagine if something works for you before you get it? Or is it so hard to imagine that people actually know what they want or don't?
People trying to plan accurately, end up with a list of things to think about containing more than seven items, and human psychology is such that this makes it *feel* infinite despite us being able to see that it isn't.
People who don't worry to much and vibe it, get pregnant/cause pregnancy by accident, often but not always as teens. Despite not planning carefully, and even in pre-industrial societies where a lot more problems were rapidly fatal and the best you could hope for in such cases regarding childcare allowance was a shotgun marriage, vibing it generally works.
With more certainty:
I'm not sure what the distribution is of women hearing about painful births and saying "nope!", but I do know it's more than none.
I know a few deliberately childfree couples who like the higher income and lack of responsibility, and have zero interest in proposals such as this.
Currently every state has a safe haven law where new mothers can leave an unharmed infant up to 7-30 days depending on the state anonymously at hospitals, fire stations or police stations and it’s not considered abandonment.
Finding people willing to adopt newborns is also fairly easy now.
The data is robust that some don’t want children out of economic reasons, and others don’t want them out of lifestyle choices (prioritizing self over a thankless job). Across several national pro natalist policy programs, the evidence shows that even when enormous amounts of benefits are provided, it barely moves the realized fertility outcome.
(40% of pregnancies in the US and internationally, annually, are unintentional, and we have enough humans we don’t take care of already [1], we should be radically empowering as many as people who don’t want to have kids to not have them)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44407283
One thing I've never had the datasets to work with to do is to just make a scatterplot of US counties by fertility vs median home square footage, and I think analyzing such a relationship is a missed opportunity.
Consider: the government pays a salary to each married family while they raise children; the salary would be equivalent to a blue-collar job, and it would scale with the number of children up to a point (e.g. 4 kids).
I strongly believe that'd lead to many more marriages and childbirths. Many people not interested in raising kids would prefer it over a "regular" job. Families with adoptive children would also be paid, so it could decrease adoption difficulty and stigma as a side-effect.
However, some people will game this policy, and it would be very expensive to implement.
While this somewhat help lower paid families, we still have a huge number of men that just leave their families once kids appears and leave a single mother to raise the kids -- which have their own issues.
[1] I may be a bit off in the values, but you get the idea.
I believe most of countries have orphanages already -- and what you're suggesting already exists in some countries (I do believe we still have that in Brazil).
While that could increase the number of people, orphanages are not great places to raise a child (with rare exceptions). Imagine you growing up with a large group of other child, and nobody actually take the time to take care of you. What kind of person would you be today?
This sounds just like some people approach pets
People trying to plan accurately, end up with a list of things to think about containing more than seven items, and human psychology is such that this makes it *feel* infinite despite us being able to see that it isn't.
People who don't worry to much and vibe it, get pregnant/cause pregnancy by accident, often but not always as teens. Despite not planning carefully, and even in pre-industrial societies where a lot more problems were rapidly fatal and the best you could hope for in such cases regarding childcare allowance was a shotgun marriage, vibing it generally works.
With more certainty:
I'm not sure what the distribution is of women hearing about painful births and saying "nope!", but I do know it's more than none.
I know a few deliberately childfree couples who like the higher income and lack of responsibility, and have zero interest in proposals such as this.
Finding people willing to adopt newborns is also fairly easy now.