u/strawberrypanicked

To preface, I strongly believe we should not force people to have children if they don’t want any. I also believe most people who are in their golden years right now don’t regret not having children.

However, our demographics have never been this inverted before in history. People who are older now are only just really starting to see some of the impacts of our population collapse but are still relatively sheltered from the consequences.

It used to be that not only were communities close-knit enough that even not having kids still meant a lot of those social needs were met, but also that your family and the people around you had enough people and children to still have those sorts of close familial ties even as you got older.

But now with population collapse, I fear that when the younger generations (millennials and Gen Z (though maybe a bit early to predict anything for Gen Z)) get older, many more will regret not having children than ever before. The world is already headed towards social isolation and I feel like family units are also becoming more segmented than ever before.

This is also without going into that there will be a lack of people to care for them as well. And I don’t simply mean having your kids care for you, but also in hospitals, nursing homes, home aides, etc. I can’t help but feel like there is going to be more mass suffering in our future elderly populations than ever before.

This seems to be a relatively new thing. While I do feel like banks are unethical, they’re not really pretending to be anything they’re not as far as involvement and donor responsibility goes and there are a ton of legal protections. I believe a KD situation with a person you already know and trust is the ideal situation hands down.

But I’ve been noticing lately that there’s been an uptick on couples or SMBC seeking out men on apps specifically for the purpose of saying their children have a known donor. While this seems sweet in practice, I find myself thinking this is almost as unethical and frankly way more irresponsible than using a bank.

I feel like people have gotten swept up in the idea that just because a known donor is the ideal, that means that finding one by any means necessary is way more moral or better than other options. As I said, this concept is relatively new so I guess we will have to see what the new generation of DCP feel when they’re older.

And to give context on my own background, my parents used an anonymous donor and didn’t even tell me I was donor conceived until I was in high school!!! Which was a huge mindfuck at the time and I did eventually meet my bio dad (thanks 23andme) so I definitely am not supporting anonymous donation or even banks in general, it was just something that I had been seeing a felt a bit icked out by.