Child-safety laws may reduce the birth rate - The Economist

Their study, “Car seats as contraception”, published in SSRN, a repository for so-called preprint papers that have yet to undergo formal peer review, examines the effect that car-seat policies may have had on American birth rates between 1973 and 2017.

Today, most places in America make children sit in safety seats until their eighth birthdays.

Instead, they point to previous studies which suggest that, for children over two, safety seats are no better than seat belts at protecting against death or serious injury in a crash.

They estimate that laws requiring children to sit in special seats until they are eight years old saved about 57 lives in 2017 and contrast that number with the 8,000 children who might have been conceived and born in the absence of such rules.

There is, they conclude, no “compelling social interest” in requiring child seats for children over four.

Alisa Baer, a paediatrician in New York who specialises in car-seat safety and who says she has installed at least 15,000 such seats over the years (she is known as “The Car Seat Lady”), says that this part of the paper is “completely preposterous”.

Children’s car seats, she says, “save the quality of life” of children who would suffer higher rates of injury compared with simply belting up—including massive abdominal trauma and paralysis

And one such, it seems, is that the back seats of American cars, once renowned as places where children were conceived, may now, themselves, be acting as contraceptives.â–