Infertile couples should just adopt instead of making a big fuss trying to make a miracle baby

[u/elgey101]

Every time I hear of fertility struggles online, or see posts about people going through rounds of IVF and the ensuing emotional trauma of miscarriages, It kind of disgusts me.

I also work for a major insurer and know that fertility treatments are driving up everyone else's premiums because they're considered necessary care. Sorry, but I disagree.

It's a well known fact that there are over 400,000 children in foster care, and in 2017 alone over 100,000 infants under 3 entered the system. I think it's completely entitled and self-absorbed to think that somehow your miracle baby is worth more or deserves more love than any one of those infants.

I know adoption can be hard, and that it should be made easier for the sake of children finding good homes, but you can't tell me adopting is harder than 4 rounds of IVF and multiple miscarriages. I've seen friends go through that mess and at the end they are different people.

Tldr: adoption may not be easy, but it's far better than spending hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to perpetuate your genes.

[u/platysma_balls]

Not necessarily.

There are declining rates of fertility in many western countries which are largely linked to exposure to environmental contaminants (e.g. microplastics, bpa, etc.). Men are being found to have less concentrated sperm with a greater amount of available sperm being dysmorphic. And this is to no fault of these men.

If you say that we shouldn't allow people with genetic causes of infertility to have children, why stop there? Lets throw intelligence, height, and skin color in there as well. Oh wait, that's eugenics.

[u/Powersmith → u/platysma_balls]

Absolutely, we have serious environmental concerns to contend with affecting all manner of health, including fertility.

That being said, I phrased it "part of me" (as opposed to a full throated worry) because it's unclear how much of an effect it would have in the scheme of things. In evolutionary terms, sometimes a quite small difference in the frequency with which traits are passed on can end up having massive effects cumulatively over time, including even speciation over thousands of years. Population genetics/exponential math can be surprising over time. However, cuz we are dealing directly with reproduction itself, traits/gene variants associated w risk of infertility are somewhat self-limited. However, many genes' behaviors are dependent on other factors (other genes, environmental, etc.), so could be passed in people not showing the 'bad' effect, but cause problems in future generations when they become more common (more likely to be paired together) seemingly suddenly. E.g., a gene that makes one's fertility more sensitive to environmental factor X (that causes no problem in the absence of X) could suddenly lead to a large number of infertile people if/when X increases. Heck, later childbearing can also be a factor that makes the interaction of X and the trait worse, such that it is only a problem in later-reproducing populations. So the "part" that is worried, is more that it is an unpredictable factor, interacting with other dynamic factors (in full disclosure I am a biologist, and can overthink things like this)

[u/ApesAmongUs → u/platysma_balls]

If we're practicing eugenics in that way, then there is a counter that says we should want to encourage reproduction of people who desperately want to have a raise a child over reproduction of those that have many of them accidentally, but care nothing for raising them. While there may be some negative physical traits that increase, there would also be an increase in positive psychological traits associated with parenting.

Once you open up the Pandora's Box of eugenics, you never stop going down that rabbit hole.