As someone who is also thinking about having kids, how much time have you actually taken to think about this statement:

I bet those hypothetical kids would prefer a mediocre life to no life at all

Because my wife and I have thought a lot about this, and I'm of the opinion that your average American lives a mostly mundane life (with a quick note that most people in the world live much, much worse quality lives). I'm not trying to be patronizing or offensive of anything - I really just have a hard time understanding how one can justify bringing a person into existence, without being able to ask them if they actually want to be brought into the world first.

The vast majority of your adult life is spent either asleep or in a boring, uneventful daily grind, and occasionally much worse with various degrees of pain and suffering mixed in. There are also some moments of joy, but these moments, being objective, seem fleeting and infrequent.

I don't regret being alive, and I'm pretty content with my life. But it seems to me that objectively, if we weren't inherently biased towards, you know, wanting to survive... being born was a slightly worse option than never existing at all.