Given the citations on the previous page, which appear to indicate that the discrepancy is largely due to the decline of the shotgun wedding, it appears that the real issue here is whether or not shotgun weddings are of benefit to the child and parents.
It sure looks like that’s the next question to tackle, since it seems fairly clear to me now that there were more than three times as many unwed pregnancies/births, per teenage capita, in 1957 as there were in 2000.
If there’s no serious rebuttal to that claim, I’d say we can move on to that question, which I think deserves its own thread.
Interestingly enough, I imagine that the start of that debate will be an intuitive reaction: yeah, they’re bad. But are they? Are they worse than single parenthood? Is trhere some set of objective criteria we can apply to the question?
I would like to see some stats on single parenthood and divorces, since we still don’t know how many of those mothers really end up being single mothers or how many of the married parents get divorced. However, I don’t think this is going to get us anywhere as far as morals are concerned. Some people will argue that abortions are by definition bad, others will disagree. Some people will argue that single parenthood has only limited influence on the quality of life for the kids, and economic situation is more important, others will pretty much claim that kids need a wedded mother and father.
I suppose we could look at the number which end in divorce, although I suspect determining the true numbers of shotgun weddings (and thus the percentage which end badly) would be more than a little difficult.
Or, we could look at the combined household incomes of never-wed single parents, and compare to the household incomes of non-divorced shotgun couples.
Perhaps most simply we could look at the median highest academic achievement level of children born to single teenage mothers and compare to children born to shotgunned parents.
Obviously, neither divorce rates, household incomes or academic achievement tells the whole story, but perhaps taken together they would establish whether or not shotgun weddings are on the whole objectively better for the parents and/or child.
Naturally, nothing is going to properly account for the unhappiness of a parent forced into a marriage by pregnancy - or of a young mother struggling to raise a child alone, for that matter.
I don’t know. I read “It Takes a Village” by Hillary Clinton and she certainly conjured up images of the good old days when members of the community cared for one another. Strictly speaking, nostalgia isn’t a conservative or liberal thing.
Odesio
This is an example of how one’s ideology and political views can color someone’s perspective. If you’re on the extreme pro-choice side, then abortion is simply a matter of preventing reproduction. On the other hand, if you’re either pro-life or moderately pro-choice, then abortion also becomes a question of taking a life. One might argue about whether the ending of a human life is justified or not, but for people on that side of the spectrum, it isn’t merely a matter of reproduction.
And there lies the rub. Stating that morality doesn’t enter the question because we are only talking about biological functions is circular reasoning. This approach assumes an extreme pro-choice viewpoint as the crux of its argument.
Well, not really. Either you’re pro-choice, in which case you don’t believe it is a life; or you’re anti-abortion, in which case you believe it is a life and that all abortions are murder.
In the former case, morality is not an issue; in the latter, the absolute numbers shouldn’t bother you because your goal is to prevent all abortion.
Three times as many in 2000 as in 1957, isn’t it?
Excust me: Tree times as many. 
True, but there’s other concerns than just those of the fetus to take into account. Firstly, there is plenty evidence that prohibition may or may not reduce the number of abortions, but it certainly doesn’t eliminate it. People are still going to have abortions. And if historical data is any indication, it increase the medical risk for any pregnant women who decides to have an abortion. Also, are we prepared to legally punish the mother for it? What about the doctors? What about the fathers? Should the mothers be forcibly sterilized? Yes that really happened. Would that help or make the situation worse?
Anyway, even with those 12/1000 v. 39/1000, I don’t think you’ve got the numbers on how many of the babies are raised by a single mother (with or without grandparental involvement) v. how many are adopted out.
Please correct me if I’m mistaken about that.
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. By your own admission, this thread was prompted by his assertions about the rates of teen pregnancy, and yet in your OP you take his assertion as the default position and challenge everyone else to refute or support it.
Why, if this issue really does interest you, won’t you simply say to Starving Artist something like, “I think your assertion about higher rates of teen pregnancy today seems, on its face, to be reasonable. But when you make a factual assertion like that, it needs to be based on evidence. What is your evidence that out-of-wedlock pregnancies among teenagers were lower in the 1950s than they are now?” That is, rather than take his bald-faced assertion and spend hours debating it with other people, why don’t you ask him to support his claims?
I notice that you also completely ignore Starving Artist’s torturing of the evidence in his “arguments” about the relative importance of girls wanting to get out of school, on the one hand, and factors such as cultural permissiveness and peer pressure, on the other. You say that you want to focus on the factual question of the numbers, but if your purpose really is to investigate the nature of Starving Artist’s claims, you need to address those claims in the context of the broader arguments that he makes. Even if we establish that teen pregnancy rates are higher today than half a century ago, it doesn’t necessarily support his broader argument about liberal values. Given that this thread emerged from one that was specifically about Starving Artist’s shady use of evidence and his spurious conclusions, it seems completely wrongheaded to deal with the factual claims by themselves; it’s also problematic to deal with them by asking everyone else on the board to do Starving Artist’s homework for him, rather than asking him to provide evidence for his own assertions.
If i debate you on a topic, and you make a claim that i find disputable, i will ask you to support it. I’m not going to start another thread and say to the board, “Hey everyone, Bricker said X. He provided no evidence except his own hidebound certainty, but for the moment i’m going to assert that X is true, and i want all of you to prove me wrong, if you can.” Debate doesn’t, or shouldn’t, work that way.
Now, it may be that you are declining to address Starving Artist directly because you believe his own “arguments” to be so completely irrational and unsupported that they require no rebuttal. I could certainly understand that position; it’s one that i’ve taken myself in the past. But if that’s the case, you could be a bit more explicit about this, because right now it appears that you’re doing little except acting as a sort of proxy for him, taking his claim as axiomatic and tending to completely ignore the context in which he made it, and the broader political position it was designed to buttress.
Correct. After going through all that trouble to get to those numbers, I reversed them in a summary sentence.
Yes. Three times as many in 2000 as in 1957. Dat de troot.
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.
True. But there are certain propositions that appear on the surface intuitively obvious. To me, that’s certainly sufficient to begin a debate. If there’s no evidence either way, you can certainly argue that the burden of persuasion has not been met. In this case, the idea that the rate of out-of-wedlock pregnancies in the fifties was lower than it is today seems intuitively sound… and, indeed, has now been borne out by the evidence.
I would hesitate to call pregnancy resulting in a shotgun wedding a “wed pregnancy” at all, though in purely literal terms it is, of course. Why is unwed pregnancy and birth more compelling evidence of the breakdown of traditional morality than unwed conception?
Starving’s main point when he brings this up is that liberal permissiveness has resulted in more unmarried copulation, as far as I can tell - and getting married afterwards doesn’t erase the stain* of pre-marital sex.
*Poor word choice - I don’t think there’s anything wrong with premarital sex, and engage in it myself as often as possible - but I couldn’t think how else to phrase it.
I disagree that those reasons are compelling, but for the sake of argument, let’s grant that they are. If anything, they constitute arguments against Bryan Ekers’s claim that abortion is about nothing more than a biological imperative (i.e. reproduction) – and that is, after all, the point that I was addressing.
I will put a data point here that I think should be included in the discussion, at least if you want to take seriously SA’s claims that raging liberalism is the main cause of teenage pregnancies.
Teenage birth rates by country per 1000 women age 15 - 19.
Country ↓ birth rate ↓ abortion rate ↓ Combined rate ↓
Netherlands 7.7 3.9 11.6
Spain 7.5 4.9 12.4
Italy 6.6 6.7 13.3
Greece 12.2 1.3 13.5
Belgium 9.9 5.2 15.1
Germany 13.0 5.3 18.3
Finland 9.8 9.6 19.4
France 9.4 13.2 22.6
Denmark 8.2 15.4 23.6
Sweden 7.7 17.7 25.4
Norway 13.6 18.3 31.9
Czech Republic 20.1 12.4 32.5
Iceland 21.5 20.6 42.1
Slovak Republic 30.5 13.1 43.6
Australia 20.1 23.9 44
Canada 22.3 22.1 44.4
United Kingdom 29.6 21.3 50.9
New Zealand 33.4 22.5 55.9
Hungary 29.9 30.2 60.1
United States 55.6 30.2 85.8
Whatever the reason is behind the US’s rate, if you think that teenage pregnancy is a problem, the US is massively behind compared to other western countries that are far more liberal.
Not true. For example, some people maintain that the unborn is fully alive (fully human, even), but they don’t want any legislation against abortion.
And that is yet another example of how ideological bias can color one’s perception. People on the extreme pro-choice side often think that everyone who favors legal abortion must surely do so because they don’t consider the unborn to be anything more than a collection of cells… and that’s simply not so.
With you making the decision, that would be impossible. You reject anything that is counter to your beliefs. People’s experiences are just booted by you.
What? I stated a bunch of bad effects that criminalizing abortion could cause. I’ve said nothing about the morality of abortion at all.