I don’t think you’ll get a meaningful statistic on teen-pregnancies terminated via abortion, simply because in the 50’s it was both illegal and taboo, and so any attempt to try and derive statistics on abortion in that period is probably little better then a shot in the dark, and even today its probably inexact.
But if you’ll be satisfied with teen pregnancies that lead to a birth, then we’ve already answered the question. The rate of teen pregnancy has about halved since 1957, while the proportion of teen woman who are unmarried at the time of conception is about 90% vs 40% in 1955-1959. So assuming my algebra is correct (its late here), I think you’ll see that the two rates for total unwed teen pregnancy are within a few points of each other. A larger chunk of teens who get pregnant remain unmarried, but they become pregnant at a much lower rate.
I just got home and I realized I have a pdf here that might be interesting because I think it addresses some of the issues brought up BUT! I haven’t had a chance to look it over and I’m going to fall asleep before I can. So if anyone wants to look this over, please do.
I’d say it’s your analysis which is weakly grasped. Your double parking analogy doesn’t work. The driver started out alive - killing him is a change in status.
But the woman started out non-pregnant. By your definition, her becoming pregnant was a problem. But now you’re saying that her going back to being non-pregnant is also a problem. To apply your analogy, you’re saying that double parking is wrong - but under no circumstances should we move the car to a legal parking space.
The only defense for the pro-life position that abortion is always wrong is the claim that every pregnancy is a good thing and none should be terminated. But if every pregnancy is a good thing how can becoming pregnant be a problem as you claimed?
Your position seems to be that abortion isn’t a problem so teen pregnancy isn’t a problem.
But abortion is not a good thing. It’s costly for the kids and their families who have to come up with the money to pay for it; it creates stress, tension and unhappiness between pregnant teens and their parents and sometimes even between the parents themselves. It’s traumatizing for many if not most young girls to have to go through. And many girls who get abortions suffer doubt, regret and guilt, often lasting to one degree or another for many years afterward, if not for the rest of their lives.
So the abortion solution is not a throw-away.
(Nor is it the subject of the OP, which is teen pregnancy, and not how it gets ended.)
Whatever. The point I might’ve made more innocuously is that SA gives the impression that his objections are moral, not political or practical in nature.
Some digging in newspaper databases has revealed some stories that add a bit of detail to the figures given by jsgoddess in her post, above. While these newspaper articles do not, and cannot, answer the comparative question regarding teenage pregnancy and births in the 1950s compared to the present, they do give a sense of the scale of the problem back then, and how it was perceived by contemporaries.
I’ve placed in quotes some of the interesting sections from each story. Click on the titles to read the full (PDF) articles.
As i said above, there’s only limited conclusions we can draw about comparative figures from these stories. They only tel us about the 1950s, not about today, so we’d have to find modern stories and figures for comparison. Not only that, but we would have to make sure, if we wanted to do a national comparison of the two periods, that we had comparable types of data (in terms of ages, etc.) for each period.
I would add, though, Bricker, that stories like this can help us illuminate another part of Starving Artist’s general position, one not really dealt with in your OP. He not only makes assertions about changing rates of teen pregnancy, but in doing so (as with most of his other factual assertions) he links the figures to a more general moral decline in America that is, according to him, the result of liberalism and its permissive policies and lax moral standards. Furthermore, he generally seems to locate the start of this decline somewhere during the late 1960s, give or take a bit.
These stories don’t allow us anything like definite conclusions about this issue. Indeed, definite conclusions about social and cultural trends are often hard to come by at the best of times; the nature of cultural history is such that we are essentially trying to understand broad ideas, ideals, mentalités, etc., which are often not amenable to empirical comparisons. Still, it seems to me that the stories above suggest that long-term changes in sexual morality, social permissiveness, and youth promiscuity were well underway, and were already the subject of some societal concern, well before the Civil Rights era and the feminist movement and the Great Society came along and fucked everything up.
That is, even if we established that teenage promiscuity and pregnancies have increased over the past 40 years or so, it is by no means clear that this development is the result of modern liberal policies and permissiveness. The trend seems to have begun before the rise of SA’s dreaded liberal ideology, so it could simply be that the trend continued despite (rather than because of) liberal ideology.
A problem with history is that, while we can ask counterfactual questions and have interesting discussions about them, society does not provide a closed and controlled environment in which we can test out our alternative hypotheses. We can never know what would have happened with teenage pregnancy in the absence of post-60s liberalism.
So the only actual hard numbers we have show that teens in the 50s gave birth at almost twice the rate of teens in the 2000s, right? All we’re doing now is pushing our own unprovable reasons why, so I’ll post mine.
Teens in the 50s were very very (very VERY) much less likely to get education past high school, when compared to teens in the 2000s. Women in the 50s were probably also less likely to graduate high school at all.
Teens in the 50s had much less access to sex education or birth control.
Teens in the 50s were more likely to be raped or coerced, due to a culture which held women in lower esteem than today.
Teens in the 50s received less responsible parenting, causing them to make poor decisions about sex and relationships.
I would dispute both the cause and the effect here. I don’t believe that fewer teens are raped today, simply because the opportunity today is much higher due to less supervision and more drug/alcohol use.
And I don’t believe that women are held in higher esteem today. Quite the opposite.
50 parents were less responsible? Did “Happy Days” lie to me?
Never mind. I see you said “unprovable reasons”. Carry on.
With regard to **mhendo’**s post, it should be considered that the number of girls in these reports represents an almost infinitesimal percentage of the total number of teenage girls in school at that time, and that in many cases pregnancy was used as a tool to escape school rather than as the result of peer pressure or a cultural environment that encourages the sexual activity that results in it.
It should also be considered that even though rumblings of social change certainly existed here and there prior to the counter-culture revolution of the late sixties, they were relatively minor in nature and most people either weren’t aware of them at all or understood them only poorly if they did. For example, beatniks and protest songs were around then, and in a sense they were the precursors of what was to follow a decade later, but society in the main held them in little regard, either not really getting them as was the case with folk protest songs, or mocking them as in the case of the beatniks, who were regular targets of fun on variety shows and late night talk shows of the time. And then there is also the influence of Playboy magazine to take into account. Clearly Playboy, having been in publication for five or six years by the time of mhendo’s cites, was already having an effect on the nation’s mores and views of sexuality by then.
Furthermore, liberalism (which is, after all, the complaint, and not necessarily when it reached full bloom) had been reverberating in the nation’s think tanks and universites for decades even before the fifties, as evinced by William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale, published in 1951.
The counter-culture revolution was merely the flash point that allowed liberal ideology to become predominant. Liberalism had already become the dominant philosophy in the nation’s news media, its colleges and universities, and Hollywood. Then, when the counter-culture revolution took place these entities were primed and ready to take advantage of it. This isn’t to say that they planned it in the first place, rather that they just happened to find themselves in the position of being able to take advantage of it and to spread the word, creating an impression throughout the country for the next thirty years that the liberal view was the one that every right thinking American held.
So what this all boils down to in terms of my assertions regarding liberalism is that liberalism has created serious problems, including the subject of this thread’s OP: teen pregnancy, and from my standpoint it doesn’t really matter much when the liberal influences that caused these problems began. They are still the result of liberal ideology. The fifties appear ideal in conservative terms not because liberalism didn’t exist, but because it was a relatively weak undercurrent and conservative values predominated. Thus it shouldn’t be considered that the image of the conservative values and lifestyle of the fifties is rendered invalid simply because liberalism was already afoot then.
“No time better than the past” pretty much encapsulates social conservatism, thus making today tomorrow’s “things were better in the Tens.”
'cept it’s all an illusion as morality has ebbed and flowed through the centuries. Always has, always will. As to whether sexual mores should be taught by society or the family – which is really the “debate” here – well, let’s just say I’m all for burning bras…however if you want to keep yours on, that’s fine as well.
What’s “better”? Well, I’d start with simply being alive and staying that way for as long as possible. And it is demonstrably true that through science & technology we now live longer than ever as a species. What we do with that added time is up to each one of us. Me, I choose not to prune-up, turn bitter and wish for reverse time travel to an era that never was. It’s a mind-fuck anyway.
You completely miss the point of the double-parking analogy. You focus on the change of status as though it’s the key piece. I could have just as easily said, “We cut off the left hand of a double-parker.” That leaves him status unchanged – at leats as far as life. Or we could confiscate the cars of double-parkers (a solution that actually appeals to my darker side).
But each of those reactions would be grossly disproportionate to the initial crime. The ill that’s being done to fix the problem, in other words, so far outweighs the initial problem that even though it fixes the initial problem, it is an unsatisfactory solution.
So even though some pregnancies are undesirable, in the sense that the better outcome would be that they never happened, it does not follow that abortion is a good thing, because that “cure” is worse than the “disease” it’s curing.
Of course, you may disagree with that calculus. That’s fine, and obviously grist for the many, many threads we’ve had about abortion.
What you cannot do is assert, as you’ve done here, that the either/or dilemma of good and bad is the only way to analyze the issue. That’s what the fallacy of the excluded middle refers to: the claim that there are only two possible positions to take. In fact, there are more. You may disagree with some of them; that doesn’t erase them.
May we assume that this is another of your wholly original observations, based on your common sense and life experiences, rather than something wherein a citation might be expected?
I’ve tried to avoid the “why” piece of the puzzle for now. if nothing else, it seems to suffer from the post hoc, ergo propter hoc* fallacy: because the decline in values came after the rise of permissive liberalism, we assume it was caused by permissive liberalism. Even at best, it could be that both things were caused bya third, as yet unidentified factor. And at worst, it may be that the sequence of events is not even as we imagined it: reading those articles, perhaps the truth is that the fifties were the beginning of the rise in unwed pregnancies and it was the FORTIES that were the golden age as far as sexual morality and pregnancy were concerned.
I don’t know, and I don’t think we have enough data on the table to even begin a run at that question yet. I do think that trying to resolve all of those complex questions when we have yet to nail down definitive stats for the question i posed in the OP is folly.
Well, it’s tricky to impregnate American teenage girls when you’re stationed in Europe. I would expect that WWII would throw a big wrench into teenage pregnancy statistics in the 40’s, and that we’d need to look at the 30’s as well in order to distinguish between trends and aberrations.
That may all be true, and in some cases it certainly is (in some, it’s frankly not a big deal) but it’s still not the same as a pregnancy carried to term. You cannot lump them together and pretend they’re the same thing. They are not. An illegitimate birth is a completely different situation and **it’s unambiguously what you’ve been complaining about all along **- kids born to teenaged mothers.
