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.
It’s not the car seats that are the contraception, it is the cars themselves.
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.