# Tings Were Better In the Fifties, Vol. I: Teen Pregnancy (the SA debate series)

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996>\
**Category:** Great Debates\
**Created:** [November 2, 2009, 12:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996 "2009-11-02T00:05:02Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 93

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**Author:** ![Bricker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@Bricker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bricker)\
**Post date:** [November 2, 2009, 6:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/93 "2009-11-02T18:44:40Z")

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> [@mhendo](#):
>
> Wow, i guess i should be grateful that you respond at all, but i’m curious as to why you show absolutely no apparent interest in the claims that **Starving Artist** himself makes about these figures.

**Starving Artist** has already meade clear that he has no interest in debating. His _modus operandi_ is simply to assert things he finds to be self-evident. As I said to him in the Pit thread, that’s fine… but not in GD.

So the purpose of this thread, and the ones that follow, is to take some of the statements he’s made that have infuriated readers and try to tease out, in GD fashion, whatever objective facts may or may not support them. Here, it seems pretty clear that there were fewer unwed pregnancies in the fifties, per capita, than there are now. He said this, but he said as part of a larger argument of some kind. One problem with someone that eschews "debate is that that nailing down their precise argument can be difficult. But I’ve chosen to parse it as: _Things were better in the fifties, because (in this part) there were much fewer unwed pregnancies than there are now._

It’s clear that there were fewer. Now: is it better? That’s what we can explore next. We finish this, we’ll pick another claim and have at it.

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