Of course it is. It's a method of population control. Think how much more overpopulated Earth would be if practicing homosexuals were reproducing instead.
Sounds like fun, at least ballparking it/back of envelope.
Ignoring socio-economic pressures (people from developing countries having more kids and such, or perhaps the thing where military types have more daughters) and ignoring lesbians playing with a turkey baster or those crossing swords using donor eggs/surrogates as (spoiler) it seems the number of kids being "raised" is maybe 2 million at most which is almost insignificant in the face of what is to come and that is raised and not created via... non conventional? means. Also being generous and assuming 5% practising (one of your chosen constraints) LGBT[
extra letters as appropriate] population (
http://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.e...bt-demographics-studies/lgbt-demogs-sep-2014/ reckons a bit lower but for the sake of argument can we have a bump there to assume that the fertility rate is offset a bit*?
Now this is just one generation and 5% compound interest grows quite quickly (
http://www.thecalculatorsite.com/finance/calculators/compoundinterestcalculator.php ) so we have to decide how that plays out if we apply recursively, do we assume bad old days and underground means practising numbers are then a statistical anomaly or back rooms and alleys or do we have to figure further things into this? What about the old maid thing where women over mid 20s would be over the hill and all that? Now the link I have says it is a youth skewing result as well which I might wish to consider if I was being
more accurate.
*"who has fewer abortions than gay people?" and all that.
Anyway Total fertility rate:
1.87 children born/woman (2015 est.) in
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html
This would be less than replacement (slightly over 2) so I might also have to consider immigration later as "Population growth rate: 0.78%".
Total population
321,368,864 (July 2015 est.)
x0.05 = 16,068,443
/2 = 8034221.6 (assuming 50/50 sex split, probably should check that somewhere)
x 1.87 (
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2127.html#us if you fancy trying it out for other countries with other rates)
15,023,994 extra for the US.
Net migration rate:
3.86 migrant(s)/1,000 population (2015 est.)
1,240,484 rounded up I think.
Overpopulation was mentioned. Food production then becomes my metric as there is probably plenty of land to house everybody. I will assume the next Norman Borlaug (
http://www.worldfoodprize.org/en/dr_norman_e_borlaug/about_norman_borlaug/ ) is not among the number of hypothetical magic new kids, or that one of the parents is not the same . Can I also assume the US continues to be a greedy and wasteful place with a nice bit of overproduction?
Perhaps not the best source but
http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/890/the-consequences-of-food-waste reckons "it was discovered that the US alone produces enough food to sustain roughly 860 million hungry people," Depending upon how that is broken down that could be even higher -- all that perfectly edible grain fed to cows is remarkably inefficient when it comes to getting calories in my gob, tasty though.
Anyway as a simple means of population control I am not sure. I would be curious to see what goes as far as "it takes a village" allowing any genetic component that might exist to survive, and indeed what might happen in the future if more don't suppress things (not sure what goes with the fraternal birth order effect). I suppose it is more an example of evolution is not a force towards "perfection" but a minimum viable product and it is not something that is going to end a population, despite what some might have us believe, so it stuck around.
I simply meant that a viewpoint isn't sufficient to sway my view, and it shouldn't be that way for anybody really. Unless it's a logical or moral argument of course (not just because it's written in some book...)
