Comment by emmelaich 2 days ago
Related: Car Seats as Contraception https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/731812
> We estimate that these laws [mandating safety seats] prevented fatalities of 57 children in car crashes in 2017 but reduced total births by 8,000 that year and have decreased the total by 145,000 since 1980.
Contraception is a bargain deal for any class, assuming you were not intending to have a kid.
I also question the idea that safety regulations (let's call them that) are the result of a class of people who have "so few real problems they stop minding their business and mind other's business." I get the idea, but couldn't the high cost of obstetrics and child car seat requirements be due to the wishes and decisions of people outside of this supposed class?
But babies going through car windows is bad. I don't want that. Not even just for the baby, but for me. We don't need projectile babies. Ballistic babies, if you will.
It’s not the car seats that are the contraception, it is the cars themselves.
What does that mean? Plenty of people have been conceived in the backseat, and some in the front. But seriously, what are you talking about?
car-dependent infrastructure and urban design is hostile to human life.
Car depend infrastructure is amazing to families. A mom can take her children to the grocery store in a car in relative safety without worrying about mentally ill homeless people on the subway.
I actually thought about including this in the piece (and how car sizes become a problem once you hit 4+ kids) but decided to keep it more focused on just the healthcare costs
Car seats as contraception is just a specific enumeration of the general. "busybodies as contraception" problem wherein the "has so few real problems they stop minding their business and mind other's business" classes try to force priorities on the rest of society that the rest of society can't yet afford to have. And it's not just contraception or kids. Pretty much everything in our economy gets shot in the foot by this to some extent.