U.S. teenagers having better (condom-free) sex
Posted by Josh Friedlander | 4 Comments
Or, the BBC finds another way to put it:
The US is said to have one of the worst annual rates of teenage pregnancies in the developed world.
According to a report by Population Action International, published at the end of last year, there were 44 births per 1,000 women aged 15-19 in the US for 2000-2005.
According to America’s leading health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC): “About one-third of girls in the United States get pregnant before age 20.”
More than 80% of births in this group “were unintended, meaning they occurred sooner than desired or were not wanted at any time”, the CDC said.
Well well well. I had no idea. The article goes on to mention all the costs of teenaged pregnancy, but I have trouble seeing it as a bad thing. I’m more shocked by 40-something women giving birth to twins. The health costs of older pregnancies are probably much higher in the long term than are the, on average, more healthy pregnancies of teenaged girls. While we, as a society, have destroyed any of the extended family infrastructure or psychological training necessary to prepare young people to raise children, the correct biological age for childbirth is certainly a lot closer to puberty than it is to menopause!
I wonder if that will come up or if the argument will take the same predicable route of decrying teenaged pregnancy as a problem rather than wondering how we’ve gotten ourselves into such a mess that it takes an extra 10-15 years just to pay for something (offspring) that society should be structured to support automatically.
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September 3rd, 2008 @
When they ship condoms over here that are easier to get on, you might see some drop in the annual rates.
Damn it, Plankenbrug, hurry up already and bring em’ stateside!
September 3rd, 2008 @
Should society really be prepared to pay for the offspring of nubile teenage girls?
If we have such a need to super educate everyone wouldn’t having earlier children interfere with that educational process?
Do we need to reorganize society so that women can have children in their teens and twenties and then go off to work?
September 3rd, 2008 @
I think the cost is less and the benefit is greater. You pay for it now, but children of younger mothers are healthier, on average, and the mothers are less likely to have complications. There’s some dollar value a society could put on that.
From a more mercenary perspective, we need more young people to pay for the boomers. Here is the projected age structure of the U.S.:
Older people are more expensive than children, which are (should be) a marginal cost on a household, at least in an agrarian society (now if you want a decent pre-college education in a major city you might as well rob a bank). But old people are an endless cost. Some of them eat a lot. Some of them, like babies, require diapers. Sometimes they require supervision. Often they have large health-related costs.
The only way a 57% working population can support the other 43/44% is if old people move back in with their kids (and it would help even more if they could then offset some of the childcare costs). This means, we’ve got to go back to an extended family model, which is what worked (and was essential) for worldwide societies until our incredible exploitation of fossil fuels in the past century allowed us to create such immense wealth through industry that the nuclear family came to be seen as normal when it is an extremely (and increasingly) expensive family model (and one reason, in my opinion, why nuclear families are having fewer children while Hispanic families that are still more extended are growing at a fabulous rate in the U.S.).
The problem is that the old people who would have to move back in with their kids are boomers and are being pandered to shamelessly by politicians. Moreover, all the mutual fund companies selling their money management services are doing everything possible to make everyone feel like they *deserve* a golden retirement, which is being presented as an extended (and expensive looking) vacation in which senior couples buy boats and have unnatural Cialis-fueled sex. These commercials don’t show grandma and grandpa watching the grandkids, which is decidedly less sexy. Of course, very few boomers will have anything approaching this fantasy retirement. I think a lot of them will end up working.
There’s another way we can pay for twice the number of retirees: child labor.
But I think the real solution will be to open the country to immigration and to legalize workers so that we can rope them into the tax base.
September 5th, 2008 @
I don’t understand any of this. I could barely get laid in high school.