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Notes -
It really wasn't obvious to me, and that's even accounting for the hindsight bias! Parents regularly complain about how difficult handling small infants is, and since this one is a mere dummy with a speaker and other minor electronics, I would have expected it to not produce the same emotional attachment as a real child would.
If you thought that was obvious, kudos to you, and I mean it.
I'm not against more pro-natal propaganda myself, I just think that even in the worst case, technology will bail us out before most places experience dimished standards of living due to their aging populace, with the notable exceptions of Japan and maybe China, the former likely to suffer greatly within the decade, the latter the next.
Teenaged girls are, for obvious reasons, biologically wired to want to do the work of caring for babies. In cultures where it's socially accepted they still play with dolls, although in contemporary America that's more of a preadolescent thing, and my understanding is that these classroom assignments were to take care of dolls with some added electronics, not, like, a block of wood with a speaker and a fitbit. It's extremely plausible that that assignment combines with seventeen year old decision making skills to get the result of "I'm clearly qualified and I want a baby".
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