What age is optimal for pregnancy? (study)

Hate science o'clock on the orange website.

This shouldn't be remotely controversial controversial. When my partner expressed that children were in her life plan, even 22 year-old me had the sense to say "well shit girl we better get going! neither of us wants to be tired for childrearing!"

One of the major flaws of this study from what I can tell is that it is quite literally prone to survivorship bias. By strictly looking at successful first births it's ignoring the flip side which is how many births were aborted for medically necessary reasons and/or how many miscarriages took place.

To me, this seems like they had a given outcome they wanted to prove and then worked backwards from there.

Anyone else find this an incredibly difficult article to make any sense of? I've read a lot of epidemiological research and I haven't really come across "primiparas" before, why not just call it "first births"? That's what the population genetics papers do. The only technical term in here that I am familiar with is "menarche" (first period/menstrual cycle). The rest just feels like obfuscation to make the authors seem smarter.

The massive Odds Ratios presented further down are suspicious as well - if I saw those kind of effect sizes based on observational data I would be running a lot of sanity checks and models designed to test the stability of my model outputs etc.

I don't think this will be the study to convince me that Evolutionary Psychology is anything more than snake oil.

I found this relatively well written, though I am no peer reviewer (I suspect most of you aren't either)

Would those who are flagging or down voting it please give a sentence or two for their reasons? Do you not like the methodology, the conclusion, or the article's presence on a 'tech' site?

This feels like it was run through some form of a language obscuration process. How to make this more difficult read.

If we are going to talk about evolution then why not ask ourselves why women keep ovulating till the age of 55?

> This suggests that prior to the widespread availability of surgical deliveries, men who mated with women in the nubile age group would have reaped the benefit of having a reproductive partner more likely to have a successful first pregnancy.

What exactly is a "Nubile age group"?

I think the general consensus has always been that teenage girls can't really raise children and aren't in a position to do so, but that they would probably have healthier children than women even 10 years older (though, it appears the difference is only meaningful once a woman hits her late 30s or so, which was also understood).

Of course, the "fantasy" of every teenager would actually be the ideal reality: to allow them to have total sexual freedom, sex as an open, public, and common thing, and have the social support to allow any pregnancies that are as a result of that be carried to term, and have the children raised collectively. But instead people want sexual frustration and long periods of loneliness that result in monogamy in their mid to late 20s--and why? So Mark Zuckerberg can buy a new yacht, or whatever it is he spends all his money on.

Physically, or economically?