Hacker News Reader

Comment by UncleMeat | Hacker News Reader

Yeah it is absolutely baffling to me that the discussion of teen pregnancy never seems to come up in these "oh no birth rates are down" discussions. Like, you told us that a substantial portion of these births were bad for society (and I generally agree) and now you are freaking out that the number of births went down?

View on HN

Most people aren’t aware - especially in educated UMC circles like this one - how much the birth rate relied on teenage moms.

The birthrate for educated folks has been below replacement for a long time. Teenage moms probably aren’t in their mind cause they were raised among other UMC folks and it just doesn’t happen there. The US has been below replacement overall for even longer. We’ve relied on immigration for 50+ years.

Most of these discussions talk about cost of living and so forth - which are good metrics but the biggest influence of whether people have kids is if they’re getting into relationships. As any country has more women getting online, the birth rate plummets. It’s another factor we don’t talk about in these discussions. Social media has a huge effect on getting into relationships - and therefore having children.

~40% of annual pregnancies in the US and internationally are unintended (per the Guttmacher Institute and the UN, respectively). When women can prevent unintended pregnancy, of course total fertility rate will decline to a neutral rate below replacement rate. The population exploded because women were not empowered, and now they are. Economic systems built around this anomaly in human history are structurally flawed, and will need to adapt.

Kids incur exceptional opportunity and real costs, and are unnecessary for a fulfilling life, so this outcome should not be surprising.

> Kids (…) are unnecessary for a fulfilling life, so this outcome should not be surprising.

Unnecessary in a material existential sense, perhaps, when one exludes a systemic need to take care of the elderly. One could argue, however, that the responsibility when taking care of kids are one of the few means to live and grow as a human being.

Adopt. There are ~400k kids in foster care in the US alone, half of which are adoptable. There are plenty of humans already existing who need care.

This ignores the level of issues that most kids in foster care are suffering. People want a healthy child to start with. Most children in foster care are deeply afflicted and have deep traumas that will never be resolved by any new parental figure.

Humans are selfish, broadly speaking, there is no solution for that.

Where can I find information on how much of the birthrate decline is due to unwed teenage mothers?

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2023/...

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/08/02/why-is-th...

https://www.guttmacher.org/gpr/2014/09/what-behind-declines-...

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr104.pdf

Teen marriage rates (15-17) are alread exceptionally low. One would expect as laws are enacted at the state level to raise the minimum marriage age to 18, these declines should continue.

https://www.jahonline.org/article/S1054-139X(21)00341-4/full...

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/11/01/child-mar...

I don't dispute that the teen birth rate is much lower now. I'm trying to estimate out the counterfactual "what would the US birth rate be if teen pregnancy was (say) the same as 2 decades ago" ? Currently it's 1.66.

But the back-of-napkin math is hard for me to figure out from the given "births per 1,000" women per different age group.

>> but the biggest influence of whether people have kids is if they’re getting into relationships.

cue the discussion about the dating crisis... A lot of people are having a hard time forming relationships for various reasons.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com