I have kept promising to deal with this topic and not delivering, partly because I expect you know what I am going to say. The "problem" of teenage pregnancy is a further example of the burdens civilization puts on our evolved human natures. Faced with the consequences of these burdens the media will scream "epidemic" and the social scientists "pathology" (and demand more funds to study the problem.) But let us try to assimilate the lessons of our earlier examples. What we have here in the USA, and to some extent in the developed world generally, is the "problem" of healthy, fertile, active, post-adolescent females of childbearing age having babies. What exactly is the problem here? Isn't this what they are supposed to be doing?
Our answers tell the story. Yes, they are supposed to, but not until they are out of school, married with an economic support system, and successfully launched on some route to gainful employment. But wait a minute, this is not a problem with the girls and their babies but with the context in which they have to have them. It is all very well, you will say, to claim that they are doing what comes naturally, but the world they live in is not natural. It has laid down certain conditions for them to have babies most of which require that they go through adolescence without having babies while they fit themselves for life in the world as we have defined it for them. This is indeed a world manufactured according to a male view of the life cycle in which the adolescent years should be spent proving oneself ready for adulthood, accumulating knowledge and skills, and setting up the conditions to have and support a family. In the developed world this period of transition to adulthood gets further and further expanded, as the skills needed become more and more complex. For women to "compete" in this world they have to forget any ideas of early motherhood and follow the male pattern, with the help of child care and legal abortions. The women's movement itself demands the "right" to do this and his been largely successful. To be a "success" in this man's world you have to be better at being a man than the men are.
In the developing rest of the world this pattern is not set. As a rough estimate the less developed the country the higher the rates of teenage pregnancy. Dividing the societies in the United Nations Demographic Yearbook roughly into the two categories and look at the percentage of births to women under twenty. In the developed countries it is (again roughly) 40%, and in the developing 90%. Until very, very recently in the world's history the latter was the "normal" rate. It was also the biologically sensible strategy. If average life expectancy was around 35, with many women never seeing menopause, and if the infant mortality rate was up to 80%, then the reproductively successful strategy would be to have children early (menarche would have been at about sixteen plus) and every year thereafter. As we saw in an earlier blog, in the developed world, ironically, the age at menarche has been rapidly dropping until now ten to twelve (and below) is not uncommon. This would have been a reproductive advantage in the past, but in the "developed" present it only compounds the "problem" of "babies having babies." We do not want them to do this in their adolescent years, but we are, probably as a result of artificial lighting, pushing the possibility to younger and younger ages. This is a real problem.
Is there any reason other than the massive inconvenience that it causes us because of our male-dominated career expectations, to think teenage mothers are incapable of excellent motherhood? None whatsoever. If it were so we would not be here discussing this "problem." Ninety-nine percent of your female ancestors were teenage mothers. Natural selection understands very well that given a support system the teenage mother is the best mother. Spontaneous abortions, for example, are much less frequent than with older women. Serious health problems are many times more likely with births to older women. Watch a teenage mother cradling her baby and the deep intuitive sense of care that she exhibits. If something is "pathological" here it not her and her baby; it is us and the conditions that we impose on her. We can claim this is "progress" or whatever we like. But we are responsible for telling her body something it knows is wrong: that it is not ready for motherhood and must postpone this indefinitely until it meets the novel demands of (male) industrial civilization.
The USA in fact with a teen pregnancy rate hovering between 50% and 60% US Teenage Moms could be seen as leading the revolt against the unnatural conditions of advanced industrial civilization. Rates peaked in the eighties, declined in the nineties and now seem to be on the rise again. The decline in teen birthrates is attributed to legal abortions and that in pregnancies to increased use of contraceptives. No one seems able to account for the rise. Lower teenage birthrates in less developed "developed" countries are often the result of aggressive abortion policies. There are differences for race, class, ethnic and religious categories and combinations of these. All these are interesting, but the fact remains that many teenage girls who could perfectly well use contraception do not do so, and do what their bodies and millions of years of evolution are telling them to do and having babies.
If the whole society has to take care of them then that is a reasonable evolutionary expectation too. "A support system" of some sort or other was always assumed to be part of the scheme; young mothers were not expected to survive alone. At least they had their female relatives and some form of male help: males with a stake in the children - from husbands to maternal uncles, providing protection and bringing home the animal protein. If this is not there for them now it is not their fault but ours. The answer to the "problem" may lie not in some kind of re-education of perfectly normal young women, but in a re-thinking of the female life trajectory that we have thrust upon them, a life trajectory that is essentially male. To do this of course would fly in the face of all the "progress" claimed by the women's movements over the past fifty years. Equality may have been wrongly defined in the first place. In any case, it comes at a cost. Perhaps we can't put the clock back, but we can try to make better use of the time.
