[polalavik]

A whole article about people grappling with whether to make little copies of themselves when there are tons of kids that need adopted. The whole idea of having a kid just seems like a weird selfish ego trip. I know there’s underlying primal instincts at play - years of evolution driving you to breed, but we have the brains to take a step back and say is this the best choice I can make if I’d like to love and raise a human? Could I provide a better life for an already existing human? Or am I just on some ego trip to make a little replica of myself.

[bradlys]

As far as I know - there’s no lack of adoptions for babies. The lack of adoption is for people past toddler age. Which makes sense - at that age they’re never gonna be just the product of your nature. They’ll always be a product of whatever came before them.

People like to start with a fresh slate. If they didn’t - they’d run a foster care.

[Auracle]

I wanted a baby like my wife, and my wife wanted a baby like me. We both like each other so that makes sense. We ended up needing to do IVF. If that hadn’t panned out I don’t think we would have adopted, though I’ve always thought fostering would be rewarding.

[mgamache]

it's not ego. It's the drive of your genes to get into the future. Helping someone else's genes (that have some overlap with yours) is also adaptive, but not as much as people more closely related to you.

[goodpoint]

Genes don't drive anything. They can give you a wide nose or red hairs but not your goals in life.

[mgamache]

Sure they do. You think you have free will?

[goodpoint]

Please don't make things up. Genes do not determine life goals or liking maths more than physics and so on.

[User23]

I can assure you that you will not make a little replica of yourself. It will be a new and different person that inherits some of your traits, but by no means all of them. That you're thinking of a child in that way suggests that you are right to not have one, at least until your thinking on the subject matures.

I don't see any point in arguing with the child-free types, I just see it as evolution at work in the modern world. The future is going to be dominated by those with the desires-to-reproduce phenotype. That's just a scientific fact and no argument will change it.

[bckr]

> The future is going to be dominated by those with the desires-to-reproduce phenotype

"dominated", for sure, and yet we also have a tremendous number of gay people. It's not quite so simple.

[piyh]

I find that argument flawed since it's the ultimate form of "think of the children". It implies successful parenting is a zero sum game, and that by having a child you're taking love away from another.

[thefz]

> years of evolution driving you to breed

The more I think about it the more sense this makes to me: there is no innate urge to breed, only to mate. It's what tricks you into breeding.

[throwaway19937]

One complication for this theory is that fertility affects sexual behavior; women are more likely to have sex during their most fertile time of the month (https://www.webmd.com/sex-relationships/news/20040609/sex-he...). A breeding urge explains this phenomenon, a mating urge doesn't.