A chat room:
One of the things people take an interest in is chatting. The internet provides opportunities for that. I have long thought it would be a nice thing to have a chat room on this web site. But there are problems. 1) I don’t know how. 2) A room needs to be monitored, and I can’t always be here. In fact I can’t be here much at all. So what I propose to offer is this:
If you wish to post something on your own, email it to me at info@nobabies.net. If it does not seem to be something I want to post, for instance if it is too far off topic, I shall let you know. If you disagree with anything I have to say, by all means do write. I anticipate that I shall post any such message even if hostile. Of course if it seems called for I shall attempt to clarify or defend what I have said or make any appropriate apology.
The turnover will be rather slow. I only check my in box every couple of days, and sometimes not even that. But this should be enough to give you a chance to ventilate. If a discussion gets going and somebody wants to offer his contact information to another without making it public, I ought to be able to do that. If there is a discussion on any more standard chat room, I would be delighted to post that information as well.
I might get overwhelmed with keeping up with the mail, but I don’t think so. Thus far I have received one query at the time of the genetics meeting in Tampa and have received one lonely bit of spam. So have at it. Let your ideas and feelings be known. It is usual to use a sobriquet (that’s a nickname) routinely in chat rooms and I think that is a good idea.
M. Linton Herbert MD
There have been 3,020 visitors so far. (As of the time this page is begun.)
Letter received January 5, 2010
Hello,
I have been interested in the population decline phenomenon for a while,
and you are the first person I've seen suggest it is a genetic problem.
That sounds plausible, and I am interested but not entirely sold yet.
I have some questions and ideas for you.
For your hypothesis to be true, there must be a large amount of
hidden infertility among young people. That is, there must be many
couples in their 20s who have been together for years, are not using
birth control, have not had children, and do not see this as a problem
worth going to the doctor about. I have not seen any evidence of this,
on your site or elsewhere. Do you have any?
If not, a good place to look would be in clinical trials of birth
control devices. Those trials must have control groups who are not using
the device, and pregnancies would be counted exactly. I think there have
been controlled trials of natural family planning, so there is another
control group you could look at.
Most of the developed countries see population decline as an economic or
social problem - either people cannot afford children, or are too busy
enjoying themselves to bother. Governments are trying to fix the problem
with money, which won't work if it is genetic.
The high abortion rate supports the social/economic hypothesis. Many
countries which are below replacement, would be above replacement if
all abortions could be changed to live births. Russia has more abortions
than births, so clearly the ability to get pregnant is not the problem.
How does your hypothesis explain that?
Thank you,
Mike
My first reply.
Your points are excellent and deserve more than an off-the-cuff response. I shall post your message at once and then get back to you latter when I have had more of a chance to think about it. Thank you for your interest.
LH
My next reply.
Reply 1/8/10:
You make several good points. The first, and to me an exciting one, is that you have heard elsewhere that the population decline may be genetic. I would be most interested in knowing where you heard that. In all my travels I have not heard it, although the evidence seems very strong.
Your second, and quite proper, point is that if I am right there should be a large number of couples in their twenties who have been having sex without birth control and have had no children but have not sought medical care; they don’t see it as a problem. In fact you could demand more. Since the developed world has been below replacement levels for thirty years, I would expect there to be many couples up to fifty years old for which this is true. I do not have numbers, as you point out. But informally I had had many friends who have said, “We have no children after trying a long time,” and a number who have had unprotected intercourse without children who have not specifically been trying.
But how much is a lot? I take your point that you could look at control populations for birth control studies. But again, all you would get would be “a lot.” What you need is a control. There has to be a study that extends over time in one population or compares populations holding things like education and income constant and looks at birth rate. I know of no such study. However the two studies I do have, the one from Iceland and the one from Denmark do record lower fertility with decreasing kinship with the respective populations.
Besides there are a lot of couples who do seek medical assistance. They count, don’t they? I don’t think anybody is keeping track of them in the US, but in did read in GENETICS a few years ago the number in France. It was so many that if medical help worked all the time instead of half the time, then births in France at that time would have been above replacement.
Point three: governments see low birth rates as a problem and are trying to fix it by offering money, which won’t work if the problem is genetic. Well maybe. At least just offering money for having children won’t work. But – and let me hasten to point out that I am talking extreme measures for extreme dangers – in theory governments could offer money for marrying someone of appropriate kinship for optimal fertility. I can hear a chorus of objections from my own mind, so I am sure there will be objections from yours. I do not recommend it, but I point it out. There may be the possibility of effective government intervention. Actually I have a profound distrust of government myself so I would probably be on the picket lines protesting such a move. But if it is that or death, then maybe I could be persuaded after all else had failed.
Your fourth and most excellent point is that the number of live births is lowered by the abortion rate. In Russia more than half of pregnancies are terminated. I thought that high, so I checked on the internet. This is what I found. (http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/abortion/russia/ab-rusreg2.html)
26 November 2006
Abortion ratios and percentages by region, 1993-1994 and 1999-2000
Note: figures are generally approximate.
Oh boy. Did I ever get my fingers burned on that one. Yep, that’s a lot of abortions. Actually, if other things were equal, that would be survivable, however tragic. At Harvard Medical school they told us that calculating from birth rates in the third world, the average woman could have eight children. Albion’s Seed stated that in (small gene pool sized) colonial New England the birth rate was 12 per woman and more recently I have read that among American pioneers extending into the West it was 15 per woman. Compare that with modern Italy (highly urbanized) where the birth rate is significantly under 2 per woman. Have Italians suddenly stopped liking bambinos? I ran across a story of an American couple moving into an apartment in Italy. They gave their baby to the landlady to hold while they moved their things in. Presently they looked about and saw neither landlady nor child. Several frantic moments later they found the landlady running from house to house showing the infant to the neighbors.
Still that’s a lot of abortions in Russia. It seems inconsistent with the statistics, say from Iceland, where kinship predicts fertility with an accuracy of far better than 50%. The sky high abortion rate dates from the 1990’s. And indeed times were very hard in Russia then. But for most of the first decade of the present century Vladimir Putin was president. He is, so far as I can tell, smart, tough and honest. While he was president the Russian economy grew spectacularly, and poverty declined as well.
This, then, from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia#Births
Abortion rates fell in the first half of the 1990s for the first time in Russia's history, even despite declining fertility rates. From the early 1990s to 2006, the number of expected abortions per women during her lifetime fell by nearly 2.5 times, from 3.4 to 1.2. As of 2004, the share of women of reproductive age using hormonal or intrauterine birth control methods was about 46% (29% intrauterine, 17% hormonal).
I understand that the total popultion of Russia continues to decline. So it seems that birth control has replaced abortion, at least to a first approximation. Fertiltiy remains low. And despite Putin’s success in improving the economy, he still has not really turned the birth rate around even though he tried. So something else is at work.
What I suspect is this: there is a human instict to want babies. I do not mean to want sex. I mean to want babies. That instinct is genetic. The fall in fertilty as kinship is decreased is not just a matter of failure to match up genes. It is also a matter of restricted sexual development. All right, I don’t have good numbers. But I do understand that sperm counts are falling across the world. I understand that penis size is decreasing in the United States. Does that sound like a matter of choice to you? There is a suggestion that there are more women in the United States dying in childbirth and there is increasing prematurtiy. That could be because of less excellent sexual development in woman. However, when I went and looked at the numbers, the socioeconomic effects were so strong that I could not honestly extract a genetic effect from the numbers I could dig out.
So I can only offer you a single data point. Here it is:
It is a class picture. Notice the boy in the second row next the three girls on your right.
30 chilren. 28 looking dutifully at the camera and trying to smile. One (6th from the left, middle row) wondering what his friend is looking at one who is looking at the girls. You could be forgiven for thinking he is looking at them like they were red meat. What he is doing is instictive. He was not trained to do this. The social pressure is to conform and pose. He can’t spare the time from looking at the girls.
Actully he is not looking at the girls. He is looking at a girl. He is totally in love. Hopelessly. Eternally. He will die loving her. Oh after twenty or thirty years of being ignored, as he is in the picture, and after she marries his best friend, he will attempt to put his life back together again. He’ll even fall in love again. Same result. A couple or three more decades shot. But he’ll never forget her.
He’s not lusting after her. He’s never had sex. Honest. But he wants to marry her and have children. I know. I have previliged information. I know that boy. It’s I.
He is instict driven: socially oblivious. The desire for children is instinctive and predates the desire for sex.
That’s not a lot of data. That’s just one boy. But I suspect that this is what is at work. The infertilty that comes from having a gene pool that is too large accumulates over generations. And at the end one of the last things to go is the wish to have children at all.
So I submit that a high abortion rate is just another element of reproductive unfitness. When you lump it all together, you get the overall patterns that are evident in world history as I have pointed out elsewhere on the website.
LH
Next letter posted on January 10, 2010.
My friend continues with her story from January 6, 2010.
It took a few days to write this second part. It is a love story. A love story about someone I didn't even know yet.
I left off after having my second child, where I was told in no uncertain terms not to have any babies. After the fact, I see what happened. The shots were not working on me. I was still building antibodies, and even after two shots with my second son, I still had them, I don't think they were going to go for a third shot, not without medical risks to me.
My husband had the vasectomy and we thought the problem was taken care of.
Seven years down the road, I lost my husband in a car accident. He was killed instantly.
Fourteen years snuffed out in just a few seconds. But this story is not about that.
Eighteen months later I married again. He told me he could not have children, because I had stressed to him how important it was that I not get pregnant again. My children at this time where 13 and 8. I was almost 39.
Four weeks after the marriage I was pregnant. I really couldn't believe it. I went to my Ob Gyn, and he was livid. "Didn't I tell you no more children. I thought you had taken care of that" He immediately started to write down the name and address of a doctor where I could get an abortion. He said he did not do them himself as he was Catholic, but there could be no good outcome to this pregnancy.
When I refused to have an abortion, he seemed upset, then wrote down a name and address of a specialist in the Medical Center at St. Luke's. He wanted me to go see him.
When I went there I had an intra uterine ultrasound (this was 1990) to check for genetic defects. He ran me through the paces, then said he was sending me back to my doctor, with a list of things he needed to do in the next seven months.
I was determined to have this child, I didn't know if it was a girl or a boy, but I wanted it. Somehow it seemed to make sense to me. A new life, for the one that was taken.
In my third month I was diagnosed with gestation diabetes. I had to go to the hospital once a week and take classes on proper eating for diabetes. (I have not had any indications of diabetes since then).
I had to go to the lab to get my blood drawn on a regular basis. The wouldn't just take one tube, but three. Also, I had to drink these nasty concoctions and have my blood drawn at 1 hour, 2 hours, and 3 three hours, there may have been a 4 hour in there too. But I never made it to 3 hours, without throwing up. This was for the diabetes testing. The baby was due on January 8th, and in October on a routine visit to my doctor they wanted to give me a shot. I immediately balked. I would not take anything, not even an aspirin when I was pregnant. What kind of shot?
It was Rhogam. But, I explained, I didn't get that until after the baby was born, like I did with my first two babies. I was told they had changed all that. Now the Rh negative mom was injected WHILE she was pregnant. They seemed to think this was a better thing. They even did it with first time moms. Every instinct in me wanted to run. I have no idea what caused that feeling, but I was refusing to take the shot. "Honey, if you don't take this shot, your baby is going to die, you have a really strong titer of antibodies. You know they attack the baby." Reluctantly, I gave in, thought I had really strong feelings against it.
Name withheld. Call her "friend" is you would like to respond.
January 14. 2010, my friend continues with part 3.
After receiving the Rhogam shot in October of 1990 I was taken ill within 24 hours.
Coughing, respiratory problems, I felt like I was dying. I went to see the doctor and he prescribed antibiotics and cough syrup. More drugs to a pregnant woman. They wanted to put me in the hospital, but I refused to go. I had to stay at home from work for two weeks, stay in bed, have a steam vapor going, and take the medications I had been given. They said it wasn't the flu. I was never given a diagnosis of what it was, but I just know it came on suddenly after I had the Rhogam shot.
I found out later, that a lot of women miscarry after they have the shot. They then tell us that the shot will protect the next baby? How, when they are going to give it again with the next baby.
I was sick the whole time I was pregnant. The baby was due on January 8, 1991. I kept leaking fluid, and keep telling the doctor, and he would brush me off about it. They had me coming in once a week for a fetal distress test. By this time, I was battling gestation diabetes, a cold that would not go away, (I had deep racking coughs) constant blood taking, fetal distress tests.
I went in on December 31 for a routine stress test. I had put a roast on before leaving for the hospital. After I had been there for about an hour, the nurse says, I guess you know you're having that baby today? What? No I didn't. I hadn't brought my bag from home, I was cooking something in the oven, they can't do this.
Honey, the baby is in distress, and there isn't enough amniotic fluid left to sustain her (I found out she was a "her" four weeks before she was born) not even for a few days.
I had been telling the doctor this for at least two months about a leak. Did he just ignore it, or did they not want to tell me?
I was "pitted" several times to bring on labor. Nothing happened. After two hours I still wasn't going into labor. Every time I would say "no pains yet" they would turn the dial.
Finally around 12:30pm I felt pains. She was born at 2:05pm. She was so tiny, compared to my sons only 6 lbs 13 ounces. She was so jaundiced she looked orange. They took her away to put her under the ultra violet lights. They kept her for three days after I went home. But I kept getting someone to drive me up there every morning. The nurses would say " Mrs----- you shouldn't be up here, You should be home resting." I told them I couldn't rest without my baby.
I was one of the lucky ones. I have talked to women on the Internet who tell stories about how after the shot they miscarried, or when their children were born, they had mental problems such as autism, Angleman's and a host of other problems.
My objection is that they are giving the shot to women when they are pregnant. This is not how it went with my first two. It was AFTER the babies.
I was given the shot when there were no mercury free shots. They are giving it to women having their FIRST baby. Why?
The chances of the blood mixing in a first pregnancy is rare indeed. It is while the child is being born that the chances are there, for mixing blood. They are giving shots to Rh Negative pregnant women who are married to RH negative men. Their answer is, what if your next partner is Rh positive. Well, why not wait until then to give the shot? Everyone knows that two Rh negatives can only have a Rh negative child. Why subject that Rh negative child to the shot?
It is now standard; all Rh Negative women who are pregnant get their shot WHILE they are pregnant. And that is with all their children. No matter if it is the first or fifth. No matter what their husband or boy friend's blood type is.
When babies get their vaccines, they are subjected to chemicals. The child of an Rh negative woman, has already been subjected to them, while in it's mother's womb. So when they start getting their vaccines, they already have a build up, and the vaccines add to it. Some claim the problems start after the vaccinations, some when the baby is born.
They started giving the shots while mom was pregnant around the late eighties.
Here is a statistic on Autism.
Link:
http://www.webmd.com/brain/autism/searching-for-answers/autism-rise
The number of children diagnosed with autism or related disorders has grown at what many call an alarming rate. In the 1970s and 1980s, about one out of every 2,000 children had autism.
Today, the CDC estimates that one in 150 8-year-olds in the U.S. has an autism spectrum disorder, or ASD. This expanded definition refers not only to autism but also to a collection of brain development disorders such as Asperger's syndrome and a condition known as pervasive developmental disorder -- not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS). Though all the disorders share some symptoms, they are different in other ways, including the timeline of symptoms and the severity, according to the CDC.
The apparent rise in cases triggers two burning questions for parents, physicians, and scientists:
(Does someone you love have autism? Join other parents and caregivers on WebMD's Autism Support Group message board.)
End
The article goes on, it is a long one. You can click on the link. I have no proof that the shot causes it. It's just that a lot of Rh negative mothers say they believe it does. These women have children with varying degrees of mental problems. If there is nothing to it, why have the people who make Rhogam been sued?
Do your own research. Look it up. Talk to some of these women on message boards. They have stories. I am trying to get a collection of them to post on here.
Babies are our future.
January 14, 2010 Mike returns:
Your theory interests me also as an explanation of why there are
abandoned urban ruins all over the world. Most of them are not wrecked
by warfare or by natural disaster, just abandoned. Your explanation fits.
Mike
January 16, 2008. Mike wrote and gently pointed out that he had replied to me second response to him but I had not, as I promised, either posted it or explained why. So I thrashed around and sure enough found it in the inbox. Since he has copied my letter and inserted his own remarks - including valid questions - I shall paste in his whole letter including the copy of mine. Then I'll insert my own responses in a smaller font. As you read this, what is in this kind of quote <> is mine, the rest is his response to me except for the smaller font which will be me reponding. Have fun.
>You make several good points. The first, and to me an exciting one, is
> that you have heard elsewhere that the population decline may be
> genetic. I would be most interested in knowing where you heard that.
> In all my travels I have not heard it, although the evidence seems
> very strong.
No, I have not heard that. I said you are the first. So you did. Overheated imgaination here. Everyone assumes it
is socioeconomic. I have always suspected there was a genetic factor
(different from yours) which I explain below.
Your claim is rather like an amateur astronomer, with a decent telescope
and a math degree, claiming to have spotted an asteroid headed for the
planet. Most people will be skeptical, but the cost of being wrong is
extreme. NASA or its equivalent needs to pin down the position of that
asteroid and check out the evidence. Sounds about right.
> Your second, and quite proper, point is that if I am right there
> should be a large number of couples in their twenties who have been
> having sex without birth control and have had no children but have not
> sought medical care; they don't see it as a problem. In fact you could
> demand more. Since the developed world has been below replacement
> levels for thirty years, I would expect there to be many couples up to
> fifty years old for which this is true. I do not have numbers, as you
> point out. But informally I had had many friends who have said, "We
> have no children after trying a long time," and a number who have had
> unprotected intercourse without children who have not specifically
> been trying.
Are these friends in prime fertile years, below 35? I knew several
people in that age range that knocked up girlfriends or got knocked-up. :-)
However I am sure plenty of others were careless and got away with it. Yes young, actually like in their twenties.
> But how much is a lot? I take your point that you could look at
> control populations for birth control studies. But again, all you
> would get would be "a lot." What you need is a control. There has to
> be a study that extends over time in one population or compares
> populations holding things like education and income constant and
> looks at birth rate.
Or you could (hypothetically) take the direct approach. Recruit couples
that are desperate to conceive, have no obvious problems, but have had
no success. Adoption waiting lists would be the place to look. Run down
the woman's ancestry, find one or more men at the right genetic
distance, and ask for sperm donations. If the women get pregnant, your
case is proven. I am not saying that study would be easy to do, but it
would be excellent proof. Yes, that makes excellent sence. Difficult for anyone to impliment, and far beyond my own resources.
> I know of no such study. However the two studies
> I do have, the one from Iceland and the one from Denmark do record
> lower fertility with decreasing kinship with the
> respective populations.
Those two studies are the best evidence you have so far. Let me suggest
objections that a skeptic would raise. I am not trying to tear down the
evidence but to help you test it and get better evidence.
"Couples with close kinship most likely also have extended families
around in the same area. Extended families do a lot to encourage people
to have babies. Parents pester their children to produce grandchildren.
Extended families are happy to provide free babysitting and splurge on
birthday and Christmas presents. They will also bail the couple out if
they get into serious financial trouble. Having an extended family
around is probably equivalent to at least $10K/year in direct subsidy.
That would account for part of the difference." Valid point.
"People who moved far from their extended family probably did so in
pursuit of a career or a lifestyle. Therefore they have self-selected
for putting other things ahead of children." Quite areguable.
> Besides there are a lot of couples who do seek medical assistance.
> They count, don't they? I don't think anybody is keeping track of them
> in the US, but in did read in GENETICS a few years ago the number in
> France. It was so many that if medical help worked all the time
> instead of half the time, then births in France at that time would
> have been above replacement.
Yes, they count, and I assumed they are mostly age 35 and up. I have no idea. If the
French have a bunch of young couples that cannot get pregnant, then you
have a big data point in your favor. As for USA stats, you might be able
to directly interview some doctors who work in the field. If there is a
problem, many doctors will be privately aware of it, just as many
doctors knew smoking was a problem years before the Surgeon General went
public about it. I find it very difficult to get answers from doctors or even get them to come to the phone to talk about it, even though I am a doctor and even though these are people I know who know I would not wish to embarass them. It does make you suspect there is unhappy news we have not been given.
> Point three: governments see low birth rates as a problem and are
> trying to fix it by offering money, which won't work if the problem is
> genetic. Well maybe. At least just offering money for having children
> won't work. But - and let me hasten to point out that I am talking
> extreme measures for extreme dangers - in theory governments could
> offer money for marrying someone of appropriate kinship for optimal
> fertility.
I think if there were extreme measures taken, artificial insemination
would play a big role. Especially for the married but infertile, but
also for those who want to marry for love, but who are willing to have
extra children beyond whatever they could biologically produce.
There would have to be huge subsidies. Have two children, and one parent
never has to work again. Have four, and neither parent ever has to work
again. If we had a non-debt monetary system (another of my interests)
there is no reason it could not work economically. In an age of
automation and low fertility, having four children is arguably more
productive than anything most people could accomplish in an office or a
factory.
Another thing the government could do non-coercively is to match
infertile couples up with women considering abortion, and let the couple
pay the woman as much as they can afford to have the child for adoption.
The government should ideally match the money, or at least make it
tax-exempt. Even a conservative would agree that "selling" babies is
better than killing babies. If I follow you correctly, a lot of that is already being done. It turns out to be very hard for an Amercan couple to find and American baby to adopt. The mostly seem to go offshore.
Speaking of government money, maybe you could get some for studying
"cultural and genetic factors in family size" or some similar academic
double-speak. Does the EU fund that sort of research? Pitch it as
figuring out why Americans have more children than Europeans. I really wish an academic would work on it or would work with me on it. Getting a grant and getting published are highly comepetative, sort of like hitting a homerun in the world series. Only the seasoned pro's have a chance.
> I can hear a chorus of objections from my own mind, so I am
> sure there will be objections from yours. I do not recommend it, but I
> point it out. There may be the possibility of effective government
> intervention. Actually I have a profound distrust of government myself
> so I would probably be on the picket lines protesting such a move. But
> if it is that or death, then maybe I could be persuaded after all else
> had failed.
I have read that ancient Greece and Rome both had population crises,
which were written about at the time. Rome had a bachelor tax at one
time, and there is a senate speech on record where a senator calls out
other senators for not having children. Greece was described as being
"populated by statues." Governments have tried to fix it before, but
that was in a pre-scientific age. I agree they did not have modern science, but if would seem that if money would work now, money would have worked then.
> Your fourth and most excellent point is that the number of live births
> is lowered by the abortion rate. In Russia more than half of
> pregnancies are terminated. I thought that high, so I checked on the
> internet. This is what I found.
> (http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/abortion/russia/ab-rusreg2.html)
> Russia abortion percentages by region, 1993-2000 26 November 2006
> ________________________________________
> Abortion ratios and percentages by region, 1993-1994 and 1999-2000
> Note: figures are generally approximate.
>
> Oh boy. Did I ever get my fingers burned on that one. Yep, that's a
> lot of abortions. Actually, if other things were equal, that would be
> survivable, however tragic. At Harvard Medical school they told us
> that calculating from birth rates in the third world, the average
> woman could have eight children. Albion's Seed stated that in (small
> gene pool sized) colonial New England the birth rate was 12 per woman
> and more recently I have read that among American pioneers extending
> into the West it was 15 per woman.
A lot of women also died in childbirth on their first or second child,
so there was strong selection pressure in favor of fertility. One
super-breeder could populate half a state. Nowadays everything from
vaccines to C-sections enables genetically marginal people to turn out
one or two. Most of the potential super-breeders limit themselves to
the same small number - one or two.
While previously most people were children of the highly fertile, now
the developed world is filled with the offspring of the barely fertile.
There is another genetic cause (beyond gene pool size) for falling
fertility. Have you considered that as a factor? It should be a big one. The thing is that the fertility decline is so very predictable that there seems to be only one law governing it. Since it is clear that there is a genetic cause, I really doubt any other cause is very important. Yes, half of Russian women are using birth control, but if you look at the big picture the data lines are amazingly clean.
I say this as one of the genetically marginal: only child, born via
C-section to a 42-yo mother, and I had my appendix out at age 3. That is
three strikes and I should be out.
Whatever the mix of causes - and it will be difficult to tease apart
multiple genetic and socioeconomic factors - it is clear that succeeding
generations go from 5+, to 2-3, to 1, to 0.
"If your parents didn't have any children, there's a good chance that
you won't either." - Clarence Day
> Compare that with modern Italy (highly urbanized) where the birth rate
> is significantly under 2 per woman. Have Italians suddenly stopped
> liking bambinos? I ran across a story of an American couple moving
> into an apartment in Italy. They gave their baby to the landlady to
> hold while they moved their things in. Presently they looked about and
> saw neither landlady nor child. Several frantic moments later they
> found the landlady running from house to house showing the infant to
> the neighbors.
I was in Italy in 2008. I saw some families out with children on the
Appian Way, but there was a visible lack of kids compared to the USA.
Italian cities, from what I've read, have a lack of rental property.
Therefore it is hard to move out and start a family. Most young people
live with their parents. Japan is like that too, and is also doomed.
> Still that's a lot of abortions in Russia. It seems inconsistent with
> the statistics, say from Iceland, where kinship predicts fertility
> with an accuracy of far better than 50%. The sky high abortion rate
> dates from the 1990's. And indeed times were very hard in Russia then.
> But for most of the first decade of the present century Vladimir Putin
> was president. He is, so far as I can tell, smart, tough and honest.
> While he was president the Russian economy grew spectacularly, and
> poverty declined as well.
Hmmm, I don't know about honest. He's a dictator. But I will agree with
smart and tough. He is also a nationalist in the Stalinist sense - he
wants to make Russia powerful. Russians will choose powerful over nice.
During the Soviet period there were few reliable contraceptives, and the
condoms were of poor quality. Abortion was the usual form of birth
control. The doctors were often sloppy and rendered women infertile.
I suppose nowadays they have access to European contraceptives.
> This, then, from Wikipedia:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia#Births Abortion
> rates fell in the first half of the 1990s for the first time in
> Russia's history, even despite declining fertility rates. From the
> early 1990s to 2006, the number of expected abortions per women during
> her lifetime fell by nearly 2.5 times, from 3.4 to 1.2. As of 2004,
> the share of women of reproductive age using hormonal or intrauterine
> birth control methods was about 46% (29% intrauterine, 17% hormonal).
>
> I understand that the total popultion of Russia continues to decline.
> So it seems that birth control has replaced abortion, at least to a
> first approximation. Fertiltiy remains low. And despite Putin's
> success in improving the economy, he still has not really turned the
> birth rate around even though he tried. So something else is at work.
>
> What I suspect is this: there is a human instinct to want babies. I do
> not mean to want sex. I mean to want babies. That instinct is genetic.
> The fall in fertilty as kinship is decreased is not just a matter of
> failure to match up genes. It is also a matter of restricted sexual
> development.
Wow, that makes the hypothesis a lot harder to test. Even if you could
recruit people for some type of controlled study, those who chose to
participate would be self-identifying as wanting children, thus
confounding the study. True, it is difficult. But the effect is overall still very predictable.
Your discovery is not like spotting an asteroid after all. It's more
like spotting a UFO or a ghost. If it is true, it changes everything,
but it is nearly impossible to prove. Yes. Exactly. I sometimes envy UFO buffs. People listen to them. They get air time. If the machines were out there and could be found, they would have been found. But the proof is not that hard. In fact it's on the shelf.
> All right, I don't have good numbers. But I do understand
> that sperm counts are falling across the world. I understand that
> penis size is decreasing in the United States. Does that sound like a
> matter of choice to you? There is a suggestion that there are more
> women in the United States dying in childbirth and there is increasing
> prematurtiy. That could be because of less excellent sexual
> development in woman. However, when I went and looked at the numbers,
> the socioeconomic effects were so strong that I could not honestly
> extract a genetic effect from the numbers I could dig out.
>
> So I can only offer you a single data point. Here it is:
>
> It is a class picture. Notice the boy in the second row next the three
> girls on your right.
>
> 30 chilren. 28 looking dutifully at the camera and trying to smile.
> One (6th from the left, middle row) wondering what his friend is
> looking at. And one who is looking at the girls like they were red
> meat. This is instinctive. He was not trained to do this. The social
> pressure was to conform and pose. He can't spare the time from looking
> at the girls.
>
> Actully he is not looking at the girls. He is looking at a girl. He is
> totally in love. Hopelessly. Eternally. He will die loving her. Oh
> after twenty or thirty years of being ignored, as he is in the
> picture, and after she marries his best friend, he will attempt to put
> his life back together again. He'll even fall in love again. Same
> result. A couple or three more decades shot. But he'll never forget
> her.
>
> He's not lusting after her. He's never had sex. Honest. But he wants to
> marry her and have children. I know. I have previliged information. I
know
> that boy. It's I.
>
> He is instinct driven: socially oblivious. The desire for children is
> instinctive and predates the desire for sex.
>
> That's not a lot of data. That's just one boy. But I suspect that this
> is what is at work. The infertilty that comes from having a gene pool
> that is too large accumulates over generations. And at the end one of
> the last things to go is the wish to have children at all.
If you are a data point for how things were, I am a data point in the
other direction. I already mentioned I am genetically marginal and an
only child. My parents were from big families in different states. I
have never had the sort of exclusive love you describe (maybe a good
thing?) I have had a crush, but closely analyzed it came down to "if
she was interested in me, I could seriously upgrade my self-image."
No crush has ever made me uninterested in anyone else.
Likewise I have never had any strong urge toward fatherhood. I've seen
some Kodak moments, like a friend carrying his (accidental) son on his
shoulders, that looked like fun. But I have never had the emotional
desire to have children that would cause me to reorganize my whole life
around it. Being in a relationship is nice, and I did desire that when I
was alone.
Dealing with that whole parenthood question is what got me interested in
fertility. At first I thought I was chickening out of an important life
experience, but then I found abundant data showing that non-parents are
happier than parents in modern societies.
That seemed kind of alarming - if the best life can only be lived at the
expense of not making any more, then human life is a cosmic joke. On the
other hand, if parenthood is a form of misery, why create more misery? Yes, that is a valid cosmic issue. But as I say, mate selection dwarfs other consierations. If people want to die out that way, there is no stopping them. But they really ought to know what they are doing. Mostly they think that the choices that are making their children infertile are doing the children a favor.
My conclusion was that something in modern society is seriously broken,
and if it is not fixed, it will go away on its own. We might not like
what replaces it. If rational free choice leads to infertility,
irrational unfree societies will always win. Patriarchy, tribalism, and
the caste system will take over once again, especially if you are right
about gene pool size. How to prevent that is one of my major interests.
> So I submit that a high abortion rate is just another element of
> reproductive unfitness. When you lump it all together, you get the
> overall patterns that are evident in world history as I have pointed
> out elsewhere on the website.
>
> LH
>
Many thanks to Mike fot his careful and thoughtful letter.
LH
On January 22, 2010 my freind sent another message about Rh incompatability and it's treatment. LH
End of message from my friend.