Though in saying the above, I don't think assisted fertility kids add much in terms of population numbers and I'm not especially critical of IVF ETC.
It clearly takes up a lot of research money....but as it's a moneymaker, that's going to happen in a capitalist society. I'm not sure that that affects the amount of money that goes into research that has more clear societal benefits, but won't make lots of money, or not. As fertility treatments general appear to take place in a privately funded way..though they use public infrastructure a lot, at least here, I don't think they get in the way of more medically urgent needs.
I don't get the intense need to reproduce, but I accept that it's an imperative drive for most people, as it is in all species.
0 Replies
DrewDad
1
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Fri 3 Feb, 2012 06:11 pm
@ossobuco,
I'm not arguing with anyone.
0 Replies
ossobuco
2
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Fri 3 Feb, 2012 06:16 pm
@DrewDad,
It's not different and I did not say it was.
Pick a straw.
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dlowan
3
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Fri 3 Feb, 2012 06:22 pm
@DrewDad,
DrewDad wrote:
If we're getting down to the existential crisis of reproduction...
...then what's the point of any of us being here?
Indeed. But we ARE here, and I think those of us with a choice need to be as responsible as we can. And I think we need to be enabling choice as much as we can.....which is what pisses me off a bit about someone from the US talking about over population in other countries because, under Bush, your government defunded agencies in the thirld world offering birth control other than abstinence. Not sure if the Obama regime has fixed this?
Anyway, I have a number of genes, including a two in three chance of being a cystic fibrosis carrier, that made me reluctant to reproduce.
As for the huge, ill thought out, families....as far as I understand, the best remedy for them is education and higher status for women, in western as in non-western countries.
I guess getting rid of religions which forbid contraception would be good, too.
And I think we need to be enabling choice as much as we can.....which is what pisses me off a bit about someone from the US talking about over population in other countries because, under Bush, your government defunded agencies in the thirld world offering birth control other than abstinence. Not sure if the Obama regime has fixed this?
That's a good question. I don't know either.
dlowan wrote:
As for the huge, ill thought out, families....as far as I understand, the best remedy for them is education and higher status for women, in western as in non-western countries.
That's what I heard, too. It's yet another testimony to the positive power of empowering women to say"I want!"---as in, "I want only two children. Slap on the goddamn condom already!"
0 Replies
ehBeth
2
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Fri 3 Feb, 2012 06:34 pm
@Thomas,
Thomas wrote:
ehBeth wrote:
I think that research funds around fertility have better places to go. I think Questioner explained it quite well.
I disagree. Fundamental research around fertility, which is generally payed by the taxpayer, go to no particular place at all.
I don't think my tax funds should go toward research in the area of fertility.
I would like to see Canadian tax funds that are going to go to medical research to go toward the research of things that save lives/improve quality of life first.
I'd like to see us take care of the people that already exist first.
....but I think you wrong in failing to focus upon US population as a problem.
Agreed! I don't even know where to begin to tell you what's wrong in this country concerning this issue, starting with education, non-payment (government) for contraceptives for teenage girls, etc. etc.
My problem is why couples who opt for fertility treatment are singled out in this discussion of overpopulation.
engineer, the opponents don't consider it a medical condition. In their eyes
it is an elective procedure and although paid by the IVF recipients themselves, research money is allocated to further help the cause of fertility.
Yet, I think the government itself gives very little to research - any research for that matter, so mostly IVF research is funded through private channels.
I don't think my tax funds should go toward research in the area of fertility.
They don't in the United States. It's private grants and donations aiding the
IVF research. Actually, thus far the government has been more than unwilling to fund IVF research.
0 Replies
Thomas
1
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Fri 3 Feb, 2012 06:55 pm
@ehBeth,
ehBeth wrote:
I would like to see Canadian tax funds that are going to go to medical research to go toward the research of things that save lives/improve quality of life first.
I understand. I don't like it that my own tax money pays for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, either. Such are the compromises we voters in democracies have to make. But if you write to your member of parliament with this concern, you have my blessing. (Not that you need it.)
There's something I still don't understand, though. Once the tax money is spent on whatever science it was spent on, why shouldn't willing would-be parents pay their own money to willing doctors for giving them those shots?
....but I think you wrong in failing to focus upon US population as a problem.
Agreed! I don't even know where to begin to tell you what's wrong in this country concerning this issue, starting with education, non-payment (government) for contraceptives for teenage girls, etc. etc.
My problem is why couples who opt for fertility treatment are singled out in this discussion of overpopulation.
I actually don't think Patio really meant to do that......but I suppose one could argue that spending huge amounts of money to bring another kid into a world groaning under the weight of our particular plague species seems prima facie a little odd.
I don't think humans are programmed to think rationally about having kids or not....it's just been a genetic imperative (though I'm not quite sure how genes impel in this case) and the rational thought is like something just being grafted on recently in some lucky countries.
Actually, I guess the wayngenes impel in this case is through
Sorry, iPad and A2k have problems with each other.....I was realizing that genes impel reproduction via sex drive and that we also create social milieu in which failing to have children becomes a huge drama.
0 Replies
msolga
2
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Fri 3 Feb, 2012 07:25 pm
@Thomas,
Quote:
As the late economist Benjamin Stein used to say: "If something can't go on forever, it will stop." And that's all there is to it. If our growing population is going to outrun our planet's capacity to sustain it, it will stop growing whenever that happens. It doesn't matter if we make a conscious choice to stop it or not. So why bother?
Have you read David Attenborough's ( other's) warnings on over-population, Thomas?
You seem to be suggesting that we wait till the catastrophe occurs. Then we'll change our ways because we'll have no choice then.
Even though I won't most likely be around then, I'd much rather we (collectively) acted now to avoid that catastrophe for future generations. Or lessen the impact of it for them ..... lessen the possibility/probability of wars & conflicts over limited land, water, food.
I don't accept that nothing we do now & in the near future is not worth doing because it won't make any difference.
I think there's a need to start thinking of the impact of reproduction on the impact it whole planet, our grandchildren & their children's children, & so on ... & not just for the benefit of human beings, either ....
I'm not saying that it would be easy to turn people's existing notions of "rights" & "choices" of reproduction around, but nothing at all will occur if we just let things go on & on without taking responsibility to change out existing attitudes..
Quote:
...I agree with your later point that parents should consider what they're getting themselves into. But I don't see how that will be an unusual problem for the children we talk about here. Their parents, after all, are willing to spend thousands of dollars to bring them into existence. So we can assume, at least as a general rule, that the children won't be unwanted.
Spending thousands, whether for IVF or for any other aspect of children's lives does not guarantee that children will be loved & cared for, any more than we can assert that all children of poverty-stricken families will experience the opposite.
I'd like to say more on this (I agree with much of what ehBeth has posted) but can't now .... later.
Once the tax money is spent on whatever science it was spent on, why shouldn't willing would-be parents pay their own money to willing doctors for giving them those shots?
This is Canada. There isn't much doctors can do outside of the publicly funded system. There are some private clinics that can be accessed, but there are not a lot of resources for fertility treatment here.
Canadian couples could probably go to the U.S. for their fertility treatments. I'd definitely prefer that - I don't want them using the publicly funded medical infrastructure here.
0 Replies
ehBeth
1
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Fri 3 Feb, 2012 07:38 pm
@Thomas,
Thomas wrote:
But if you write to your member of parliament with this concern, you have my blessing. (Not that you need it.)
Funding re IVF has already been defeated at the Supreme Court level here. I know there will be more runs at it. I keep a sort of casual eye on it - it will get a lot of media coverage if it comes up again.
Quote:
One Nova Scotia couple appealed their province’s refusal to fund any IVF all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada without success. So far, there has been no significant change in the level to which infertility treatment is funded.
Some expenses can be partially claimed back at tax time.
As the late economist Benjamin Stein used to say: "If something can't go on forever, it will stop." And that's all there is to it. If our growing population is going to outrun our planet's capacity to sustain it, it will stop growing whenever that happens. It doesn't matter if we make a conscious choice to stop it or not. So why bother?
Have you read David Attenborough's ( other's) warnings on over-population, Thomas?
Not Attenborough's, but Paul Ehrlich's, The Club of Rome's and others'. The ones I've read are all rubbish, and empirically-refuted rubbish at that.
MsOlga wrote:
Spending thousands, whether for IVF or for any other aspect of children's lives does not guarantee that children will be loved & cared for, any more than we can assert that all children of poverty-stricken families will experience the opposite.
Of course, nothing in life is guaranteed. It's possible that a child gets conceived with help of a hormone shot and then treated badly once born. But it's not the way to bet. And when we develop moral rules, we're deciding on a way to bet. My point is that if people want a child so much they're paying large amounts of money to conceive it, it's a bad bet to presume that it child will be unwanted. Possible, but unlikely.
Thomas, I have the greatest respect for David Attenborough's experience, knowledge & integrity & listen when he speaks.
Always did before, because of his excellent work as a naturalist, but now that he is in his 8os, his message is becoming more urgent.
Quote:
This heaving planet David Attenborough
Published 27 April 2011/New Statesman
Half a century ago, the WWF was formed to help save endangered animals. Today, it’s human beings who are increasingly at risk, through overpopulation and food scarcity. Can we bring our birth rate under control and avert potential catastrophe?
I posted this article here soon after it was published & didn't receive one response to the thread. Oh well ....
Amongst other things he said:
Quote:
...I suspect that you could read a score of reports by bodies concerned with global problems - and see that population is one of the drivers that underlies all of them - and yet find no reference to this obvious fact in any of them. Climate change tops the environmental agenda at present. We all know that every additional person will need to use some carbon energy, if only firewood for cooking, and will therefore create more carbon dioxide - though a rich person will produce vastly more than a poor one. Similarly, we can all see that every extra person is - or will be - an extra victim of climate change - though the poor will undoubtedly suffer more than the rich. Yet not a word of it appeared in the voluminous documents emerging from the Copenhagen and Cancún climate summit ....
.... I simply don't understand it. It is all getting too serious for such fastidious niceties. It remains an obvious and brutal fact that on a finite planet human population will quite definitely stop at some point. And that can only happen in one of two ways. It can happen sooner, by fewer human births - in a word, by contraception. That is the humane way, the powerful option that allows all of us to deal with the problem, if we collectively choose to do so. The alternative is an increased death rate - the way that all other creatures must suffer, through famine or disease or predation. That, translated into human terms, means famine or disease or war - over oil or water or food or minerals or grazing rights or just living space. There is, alas, no third alternative of indefinite growth.
The sooner we stabilise our numbers, the sooner we stop running up the "down" escalator. Stop population increase - stop the escalator - and we have some chance of reaching the top; that is to say, a decent life for all. ....
Here's instalment no#1 of his BBC program on population growth & its impact/s.
If you're interested you can easily watch the rest from YouTube:
So, OK, I realize that this is quite a jump from most of the posts to this thread.
And I don't plan to post any more such material. (But I couldn't resist this opportunity!)
I'm just saying that that there is far more to the decision to reproduce than the concerns of the people wanting a child, that's all.
And it seems rather bizarre, going back to patiodog's original post, that, while some (who can afford it) want to increase their diminished prospects of reproduction via very expensive fertility treatments, well-informed people like David Attenborough are warning us about the effects of an inevitable population explosion at the same time.
Anyway, please continue now....
I've said what I've wanted to day.
0 Replies
Setanta
1
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Sat 4 Feb, 2012 04:08 am
@ehBeth,
ehBeth wrote:
Setanta wrote:
Fertility treatments are necessary in the idustrialized world because fertility is declining.
Why does that matter?
It matters only in respect to those people who want to have children, but find that they cannot do so without medical intervention. It is not a statement on my part that people should have children, just a comment on why people who would have children, and who live in the industrialized world are likely to need fertility treatment.
0 Replies
Setanta
2
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Sat 4 Feb, 2012 04:38 am
I have a real problem with the question of why bring a child into a world with so many problems (no matter in what terms one chooses to frame it).
People in the so-called third world are the ones who have serious, even life-threatening resource problems, but they definitely are not the ones who have fertility problems. The people in the industrialized world who are having fertility problem, and who can afford medical intervention to solve them, are not going to be the ones facing lack of resource problems.
People in sub-Saharan Africa already don't have enough fresh water--it would be grossly irresponsible for them to bring children into a world in which they cannot guarantee them sufficient fresh water. But some place like Mali is exactly where fertility is not a problem, and having more children is an attractive short term solution of their labor or retirement problems. Russia, Canada and the United States have absolutely no fresh water problems, and likely never will have. Not Mali, nor Somalia, nor Etheopia nor any of the other "water-starved" nations of Africa are in any position to take it away from those nations.
Details like that matter, for however much we might agonize over the "morality" of our behavior either as individuals or as nations. It is not the "fault" of Russia, Canada or the United States that people in Mali, Somalia and Etheopia are very fertile while living in regions with potentially fatal fresh water resource shortages. You can't even blame European colonization schemes of the 18th and 19th centuries (which is why i chose those examples), because those populations have been in place, and growing since before Europeans attempted to colonize Africa.
The tragedy of some nations has been that their peasants grew cash crops rather than enough food to feed themselves adequately--think Nicaragua (and hence, Sandino) or any other "banana republic" so named because their kleptocracies were propped up by Americans who wanted them to produce cash crops for the U.S. market. Any nation in that situation today, however, can't blame the industrialized world for that, they'll only have their own governments and economic and social elites to blame.
To summarize, are we our "brothers" keepers? Children brought into nations of the industrialized world, even the children of poor families, very likely will have sufficient resources, even in the face of social and economic inequities. Bringing a child into a nation of the industrialized world does not rob resources from someone living in any other part of the world. Russia is not at fault because Lake Baikal lies within their borders. Canada and the United States are not at fault because the Great lakes lie within their borders. Does anyone allege that these nations are obliged to go to great difficulty and expense to ship off their fresh water to nations who don't have enough? If they did, would they then be entitled to dictate birth control policies to the nations who benefited from their largesse?
I'd say the problem i see in this is that overpopulation is not a problem in those parts of the world in which fertility treatments are available and affordable. It's only a problem in those parts of the world which both don't have such treatments available, and don't need them anyway. I can't see a linkage, nor can i see any moral dilemma.
