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Vladimir_M comments on [Link] Social interventions gone wrong - Less Wrong
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Well, it's not like we have no evidence either way. We have weak evidence for a positive effect.
It may also happen that people in dangerous and impoverished situations pursue early and fecund reproductive strategies: if you can't count on each child surviving and prospering, then you have more kids (and start earlier) to increase the chance of some child surviving and prospering. In this case, lowering the risks to children and mothers would result in fewer children.
I find it exceedingly unlikely that increasing "stigma and fear" will reduce such behavior. For instance, out-of-wedlock births, teen pregnancy, divorce, etc. are all higher in more socially conservative societies — including when we compare the U.S. vs. Western Europe, or "red states" vs. "blue states" within the U.S. ...
It seems like you're losing focus of my point. I am merely trying to demonstrate that it's wrong to consider studies of this sort as solid and conclusive evidence about the overall effects of the social interventions under consideration. I mentioned this scenario only as one plausible way in which one of these studies could be grossly inadequate, not as something I'm trying to prove to be the case.
I suppose I don't find it to be particularly plausible. Moreover, it seemed that you were discounting the study as offering any evidence at all regarding long-term effects; whereas it seems to me that short-term effects offer weak evidence regarding long-term effects. If we know something is short-term beneficial, that isn't strong evidence of it being long-term beneficial — but it isn't evidence of it being long-term harmful either.
It's worth it to keep looking — I certainly agree that it's a failure of many social interventions to look at only short-term effects, especially when this failure is iterated. That's where we get Campbell's Law from.
(That said, it would be really surprising if deeper investigation of social reality happened to closely confirm the preconceived notions of one particular political faction. I mean, seriously, why that one?)