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Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

This completely ignores the personal aspect of having children, which is the desire to have a child with your loved one. Adding a scientific way to pick a different child seems to me to be comparable to adopting... You are just doing so at a very young age. So the idea that most of humanity would jump to this mechanism just because it is possible seem to grossly misunderstand human nature.

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So it's just a PR problem. All it takes is some non-invasive technology to enforce that the woman will ovulate the right egg and the man will shoot the right sperm and it will "feel" natural enough for anyone to be ok with it.

"Google Jizz"?

Google Goo

"... the desire to have a child with your loved one"

Another element:

I didn't plan on having a kid, I just didn't take consistent enough precaution and had one pregnancy over a ten year relationship.

I don't regret it, but I wouldn't have had children if it was done through careful pre-planning.

Yep, I'm pretty sure most studies have found that the #1 most popular reason people have for having children is "Whoops!"

Even if you have a bespoke baby, it's still requires the couples' genetic material... And someone has to carry that thing to term. No one's invented a Ronco Gestation Appliance to sit on your kitchen counter yet - I believe that would cause a serious disconnect with human reproduction. As long as the parents start pumping out the hormones during the pregnancy, there really isn't an issue. But you could always make a pill for that...

>which is the desire to have a child with your loved one.

I've long wondered about this. How much of this is social inertia of 'next step' in your life and how much is intrinsic desire to do so.

I think that the "social inertia" is just a rationalization of the biological instincts to make half-clones.

Well if that is so there shouldn't be any social incentives to encourage procreation, but every society in the world values procreation heavily, most traditional societies ostracize people who can't procreate. If biological insticts were enough why social incentives/ostracization. How do you explain the social stigma of being childless.

<wild conjecture> Perhaps the social stigma is an evolved response. Maybe one method humans have evolved to incentivize reproduction is the ostracization of those unable/unwilling to have children. </wild conjecture>

Perhaps this is a red flag that mankind is nearing "peak science". It could be that periodic Dark Age timeouts are not only healthy, but necessary.

The evidence is to the contrary. Many first-world countries are in population decline, and accelerating. We'll all have to rethink what we believe to be 'human nature'.

You've posted this twice in this thread now. How is a slow decline in birth rate, to slightly below what's needed to replace people as they die, evidence that people prefer technological intervention in conception? It looks like a complete non-sequitur to me.

Its evidence that people are not biologically compelled to reproduce using sex. Because, they aren't doing it. In the first world. Leaving us with technological alternatives.

I'm not sure if you are serious or trolling... but you seem to be missing the question. The question is not IF you choose to reproduce. It is a given that some people will, and some will not. But in the set that do choose to reproduce, HOW they choose to do so is the relevant question for these discussions.

I was serious. But I guess responding the the legitimacy of the article - certainly to bring reproduction up to replacement/sustainable rates we'll need to supplement biological reproduction. Because that may become negligible. Thus the resistance to technological methods will have to be overcome.

That makes no sense at all. To bring reproduction up to sustainable rates, you'll need to convince people to reproduce. How they reproduce is irrelevant. The fact that birth rates are dropping in some places does not mean that people will always refuse to conceive more babies naturally, nor does it imply that the only way to overcome this is with artificial reproduction.

The birth rate isn't dropping because people don't like natural conception. It's dropping because they're choosing not to have babies. When people want a baby, the vast majority have nothing against the typical technique.

Your insistence that these two unrelated issues are somehow linked puzzles me.

Folks adopt; foster children; raise their nieces and grandchildren. Folks do all sorts of things to avoid the biological necessity of carrying a child. Its not surprising; its scary and hard and dangerous. I'm simply predicting that lots more people will, in future, choose new alternatives as they have often chosen in the past.

Approximately nobody adopts, fosters, or raises relatives' children in order to avoid conceiving children naturally.

Now that's just making things up.

Really? People adopt and foster because they either can't have children themselves or because they think that helping children in need is a moral responsibility. People raise their relatives' children because of a sense of familial obligation.

If you think any significant number of people adopt children because they just want to avoid pregnancy and birth, you're the one just making things up. I'm sure you can find a few people who do this, but their numbers are utterly insignificant.

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