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Comment by afarrell | Hacker News Reader

I'm also curious if we could reduce the number of children born into poverty by offering to pay men $2,500 plus medical costs to get a vascectomy.

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While avoiding the "should this idea be implemented" question for a second, I'm wondering about the engineering issues here: is it more efficient to pay men for vasectomies or women for tied tubes.

Women are subject to meaningful rate limits. Ultimately the number of women determine the rate at which a population can reproduce.

A man can mate with many women, so eliminating a single man from the reproductive pool might have a significant impact. However, the women that man could impregnate might simply end up impregnated by someone else.

Not entirely sure how to model this.

Just pay subsidy to both.

While not a perfect analogue, my understanding has it that with strays spaying has a much greater effect on population than neutering, presumably for the reason you suggest.

When you get around to building a statistical model, make sure you take into account that vasecotomies cost about 1/4 as much to perform (e.g. $700 vs $2800, in the US), and have are something like 20x less likely to have complications (although complication rates are low for both).

source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19041435

It would be cheaper to do IUDs than tubal ligation for women. There was a bill that proposed this in Arkansas, but it was shot down for being coercive.

I think that the argument from "avoiding coercion" is silly. First, because that isn't what literal coercion means. But moreover, At federal minimum wage, that money only takes 350 hours to earn. Over 18 years, thats 20 hours a year. If someone doesn't value being a parent enough to work an extra 23 minutes a week, then it doesn't seem like that is a right they value particularly highly. Also, there are laws that, taken together, coerce parents into working more than 23 minutes a week to support and care for their children. If we aren't willing to get rid of laws against child neglect, why are we worried about coercion in this case?

From an abstract frame, it seems fine. From the frame of, I don't know, the USA's political economy, it's "eugenics to keep down the black and hispanic population".

We could start by making it easier for American women who want a tubal ligation to get one. Currently, if you are under age 25 and/or do not already have 2 kids, it is a huge uphill battle. My recollection is that there are federal laws that impact this. I wrote a college paper for a law class on this some years ago. The last time I wanted to discuss it on the Internet, I was not able to determine if these laws had changed. I was able to determine that, yea, verily, women are still treated in a patronizing way, like they will surely regret deciding to close off their options and will obviously want kids later. This winds up being a huge problem for some women. I have personally known women who ended up trapped in long term poverty in part because of the reluctance of the American medical establishment to let them get their tubes tied. It's really gross.

In contrast, an American man can decide to get a vasectomy at age 18 and, yeah, sure, we will do that. No problem.

25 is a reasonable age. I would recommend raising the age for vasectomy if that makes things more equal.

The problem is that extremely poor women are often in a situation where they cannot afford birth control and are sleeping with assholes who will neither provide condoms themselves nor help her in any way if she turns up pregnant. Turning up pregnant can make long term poverty an inescapable fact of life.

I don't think denying men who are old enough to serve in the military the right to reproductive choice remedies the situation in any way.

"In contrast, an American man can decide to get a vasectomy at age 18 and, yeah, sure, we will do that."

Nonsense.

https://www.google.com/webhp?q=doctors%20refuse%20vasectomy

Another idea I heard once, that I think is pretty sensible, and which could be implemented in the future as contraception techniques progress, is to have every kid rendered unable to reproduce for free with a reversible procedure that they could then have undone (again, for free) on demand after reaching legal age, when they feel like having kids. This would remove unwanted teenage pregnancies which also tend to contribute to poverty.

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