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bokov comments on Is it immoral to have children? - Less Wrong Discussion
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You can choose to save lives, but I disagree that you have a moral obligation to actively save lives.
There are people who believe that morality is just a bug-ridden adaptation to improve inclusive fitness, and that upon analysis any moral intuition will collapse into one of "contributes to your inclusive fitness", "meaningless/obsolete", or "hijacked by others to make you contribute to their fitness". In this case, they are the people who will keep reproducing even if you convince them that by doing so they forego the chance to save the lives of strangers. Insofar that they pass this outlook to their children, they will in time outbreed those who believe that having children is immoral.
What ought appeal to both pragmatists and idealists, is the threat overpopulation (or more specifically sustainable per-capita availability of resources being sufficient to ) poses to humanity surviving long enough to expand beyond Earth. Or, if you're dealing with unimaginative types, delete the last four words.
But from that point of view, indiscriminately saving lives unaccompanied by any incentives to promote family planning is as bad as having too many children of one's own. Perhaps that $205 is even better spent funding the development of such incentives or funding technological advancement that will allow us to continue expand Earth's effective carrying capacity faster than population growth.
Saving lives does promote family planning, in a sense.
The excess growth caused by reducing mortality is temporary; once people's kids stop dying of random diseases all the time, they don't feel the need to have so many for insurance, and birth rates fall as part of a demographic transition.
When you save lives the most major effects are preventing short-term suffering and saving society all the resources that it's invested in the dying person.
The slower population growth that comes with improved education and standard of living is partly offset by increased per-capita resource demands. The quantity I don't have a clear idea how to estimate is how much per-capita consumption (lets say in fractions of an American or European) is sufficient to achieve a stable population.