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August 23, 2005
Changing our Perception of Teenage Pregnancy
Via Number 2 Pencil, I ran across an link to an editorial by Paul Sheehan of the Sydney Morning Herald that is, as Kimberly puts it, quite provocative. He argues that teen pregnancy is biologically expected and the problem is actually society’s reaction to it.
A woman's body is at its fertility peak between the ages of 17 and 23. So when young women advertise or flaunt their sexuality they are being driven by a force far stronger than the Judeo-Christian ethic. They are driven by the power of peak fertility and a million years of evolutionary biology. Nature has programmed them for pregnancy, genetic diversity and keeping the species going. A big job.
I have no argument with this premise. However, he seems to completely miss the mark as he heads towards his conclusion.
A healthier society would allow women to have children earlier than they do now. At 32, no matter what people want to believe, the reproductive system is far less robust than it was 10 years earlier. Our aim should be to have children born into a culture where there is plenty of support for child care in addition to the mother, thus liberating mothers to more fully exploit the possibilities that advanced society can offer them.
Guess what culture gives a lot of support to young mothers and children and has worked for thousands of years? The culture of marriage. Indeed, the best predictor for poverty isn’t the age at which one has children, but whether or not one is married when the children are born.
And this isn’t just some tired old Judeo-Christian ethics thing. Not only are women biologically programmed for desiring children at the age of their peak fertility, but they are also biologically programmed for wanting to keep the father around. Men are the ones who are typically seen as wanting to sow their seed far and wide, while making sure that their partners don’t. Marriage is and has been an almost universal method across nearly all cultures for dealing with the competing biological urges of the sexes.
But, instead of promoting marriage, the tried and true method of making sure children have the support they need, Mr. Sheehan lauds the recent expansion of parental leave rights in Australia.
It gives an employee a right to request a maximum of two years of unpaid parental leave, up from one year. They can request to work part-time after returning from parental leave, until the child reaches school age. And they can request up to eight weeks of paternal leave (as distinct from parental leave), up from a maximum of one.Such requests can be refused. However, the commission has placed a higher burden on employers, who are required to show reasonable grounds for refusal, rather than simply deny the request outright. This is a shift in the balance towards nurture.
If you ask me, this solution is like putting a band-aid on an arterial gusher. The parental leave decision will likely have no effect on future poverty rates. (Indeed it seems that the author came up with a conclusion (that the parental leave decision is good) and thought of a sexy way to support it by stating that “There is nothing wrong with pelvic display, push-up bras, Gosford miniskirts, spray-on jeans, low-cut tops, bare legs, bare arms, bare ankles, G-strings or even buttock cleavage, providing the displayer is young enough to get away with it.”)
Changing parental leave policies is completely useless for fixing the problems of teen pregnancies and their effects on future poverty. Pregnant teenagers usually aren’t worried about if their job at McDonalds will provide them two years of unpaid parental leave or let them work part time. If they are to the point where they are working in an industry that actually pays more than minimum wage and doesn’t have a huge turnover rate, which is when parental leave actually matters, then they are much less likely to face poverty in the future anyway. However, teenagers usually aren’t because our society is structured such that they have rarely even begun considering their permanent career path, let alone solidifying it. The reason that things have worked better in the past isn’t so much the rise of materialism as it is the necessity of more education to be considered a mature adult in our society.
Our current educational system is very inflexible in terms of how long it takes to produce mature adults (that is, if it does at all). If we want to enable people to have children younger, we need to increase the flexibility of our educational system. A (non-exhaustative) list of better solutions might be:
1. Stressing the importance of marriage before children (even if they do choose not to wait until marriage to have sex.)
2. Improving intellectual and emotional development (so that teenagers can make an informed decision of when to have kids) instead of just focusing on pure knowledge.
3. Bring back the apprentice system so that kids who want to can start on their careers sooner. (Not everyone needs to go to college to have a successful career.)
Basically society needs to mature the minds of teenagers so that they are either mature enough to not decide to have children until they are ready, or mature enough to have children when their bodies tell them to. Traditionally, society has attempted to implement the first solution. Mr. Sheehan might inadvertently be correct in his overly provocative and simplistic suggestion that the second might be worth a look.
Posted by illuminaria at 03:59 PM | Comments (0)