Comment by euroclydon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by euroclydon | Hacker News Reader

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> but some believe that giving teens birth control is encouraging them to have sex

Do teenagers really need to be encouraged to have sex? An absence of discouragement should be sufficient, for mutually attracted pairs.

High-availability abortions and contraceptives given out in schools are just examples of governments giving people what they want. However many in the anti-abortion and abstinence movements are engaged in an ambitious social engineering effort, telling teens to resist their strong biological urges to have sex, in favor of marriage and monogamy, because they believe this leads to a more spiritually healthy outcome, long-term.

There is surprisingly little innovation in this space. It's taken for granted that teenage-pregnancy is a bad word, that 30-40 year olds make better parents because they have more money. Society could choose to support early marriage and childbirth. Parenting requires a lot of energy, something that youth have in abundance. Also, young people remember what it's like to be a child, and make more empathetic parents.

Gonna have to disagree with you on that last paragraph. You make very broad assumptions that I'd dispute as an accurate generalization.

As a dad to 2 kids (became a father at 28) I would strongly urge people to wait until they were 30-38 before having kids.

Given the great innovations in this space I'd even say 40 is a great age to have kids - though it gets harder with age beyond this imho.

Why do you feel that way? Biologically that's not really the way humans were designed. It's unfortunate that the modern first world economy and society is so incompatible with biology.

I had my first kid with 38 and I wish it would have been sooner. I love having a kid now. But I worry about staying healthy enough to do the fun things I want to do with them.

And grandparents are a major factor, too. They are a great help, and also they really enjoy being with their children. Supposing my kids also wait until they are 38 to have kids, my odds at enjoying quality time with grandchildren are greatly reduced.

I'll probably be almost of pension age when my kids finish their education. That's another thing where I worry I might not be able to help them out as much as I could if I would still be earning money and connected in the business world.

It would perhaps be different if I had toiled and saved money all the time up to age 38, but I didn't. If you have kids, odds are you get more serious about those things.

There's advantages and disadvantages of both early and late childbearing. I don't believe there is an "optimal" choice. 28 is hardly an "old" age to become a father.

I do take issue with the statement that young people (people in their 20s) have energy "in abundance."

Spoken like a young person.

I'm certainly no spring chicken.

Expecting at 36, I disagree with you. It's given us less time. There is no way to wait until you have managed away all the risks.

My mother waited until she was nearly 40 to have me, and as a result I was born with birth defects (I'm deaf). There is no way to deal with all of the risks.

It isn't just lack of money. Teenagers are not as emotionally mature, they have not finished figuring out what to accomplish with their lives (career or otherwise), and often they end up being single parents. There is tons of family research on why it is better to have two parents in a family.

Government giving people what they want? Please. Teenagers can't even vote, so they aren't voting themselves contraceptives. This is adults imposing yet another view on their children. It just so happens that this is a differing view than the traditional religious view of teaching abstinence. (Or of teaching that teenagers who get pregnant should then immediately get married and the dad get a job.)

> An absence of discouragement should be sufficient

In fact, discouragement has been proven time and again not to work (or worse: to result in more erratic behaviour as a consequence of the cognitive dissonance of enjoying something you've been vehemently taught to think of as evil).

Your argument is that maybe it's okay if teens are pregnant, totally ignoring the social reality around you. Bravo, sir!

Let's trap women in an unending economic and social perdition because they'll have empathy!

With freely available birth control, including plan b and abortion, pregnant teens are a simply fixed medical issue with no real consequences.

You have a very, very, very odd definition of "free."

Do I? Please enlighten me as to my definition, near as I can tell I used the adverbial form exactly as defined here: "not under the control of another; as one wishes."

Were you inferring that I meant that abortions and birth control are always freely available? I did not state that.

Neither is the case legally, economically or socially for many women all over the world. The US is no exception.

What you propose makes a ton of sense absent the welfare state. In a world where extended families are the support network, young parenthood makes a great deal of sense. As things stand now what we see in practice is a massive transfer of wealth from the 40% of people who pay taxes to high time preference people who are net tax drains.

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