On average, American women have approximately one-half a child fewer than desired. With approximately 2 million American women turning 45 each year, the conventional end of the childbearing years, there are 1 million “missing” desired children every year. With a life expectancy of approximately 77 years in the United States, this equates to 77 million years of human life lost annually due to lower than desired fertility. In comparison, the Global Burden of Disease claims that malaria and neglected tropical diseases cost
I've been meaning to write up "fertility as a new EA cause area" for a while; I'm glad you scooped me on this!
One eye-opening article for me was https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-global-fertility-gap, where it turns out that fertility is shrinking quickly not just in developed countries, but developing ones like India too.
I think that the repugnant conclusion should be accepted, and that utility maximization is probably best achieved by vastly increasing the number of humans on the planet, provided we believe animal suffering is not offsetting them. My unpopular conclusion from this is that abortion restrictions are actually beneficial to increasing net welfare, and that utilitarians should be extremely pro-natalist, especially for people who live wonderful lives and they should be very in favor of procedures like embryo selection. I think that EA people are overwhelmingly progressive, and are adverse to restricting reproductive rights. Hard to imagine the negative effects of an unwanted child more than offset an entire human's life worth of utility.
One Million Missing Children
If ever there was an underserved EA cause, this is it.
I've been meaning to write up "fertility as a new EA cause area" for a while; I'm glad you scooped me on this!
One eye-opening article for me was https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-global-fertility-gap, where it turns out that fertility is shrinking quickly not just in developed countries, but developing ones like India too.
See also the Population Wellbeing Initiative: https://sites.utexas.edu/pwi/. They're well-funded and working on similar issues. Consider reaching out.
Great article.
I think that the repugnant conclusion should be accepted, and that utility maximization is probably best achieved by vastly increasing the number of humans on the planet, provided we believe animal suffering is not offsetting them. My unpopular conclusion from this is that abortion restrictions are actually beneficial to increasing net welfare, and that utilitarians should be extremely pro-natalist, especially for people who live wonderful lives and they should be very in favor of procedures like embryo selection. I think that EA people are overwhelmingly progressive, and are adverse to restricting reproductive rights. Hard to imagine the negative effects of an unwanted child more than offset an entire human's life worth of utility.