Every Silver Lining Has a Dark Cloud

The CDC reported last week that the teen pregnancy rate has been falling. This news has been repeated triumphantly across the political spectrum.

Planned Parenthood took this as confirmation of their carefully cultivated public image as our stewards of family planning.

The unplanned teen pregnancy rate reached an all-time low, despite anti-women's health care lawmakers's setbacks. https://t.co/evwtBdpgog

— Planned Parenthood (@PPact) May 1, 2016

"Conservative" radio host Michael Medved also noted this development. He said that this disproves the conservative fear that progressive sex education in grade school will lead to more grade schoolers having sex. Medved misses the point.

Medved points out that the high teen pregnancy rates of the 1960s meant that women got married sooner. And that reactionaries who think we were better off then, are idiots. What pathologies of the 1960s would we wish for today, he mockingly wondered. Perhaps lower rates of single motherhood?

Medved's thinking is parallel to that of the CDC. The CDC immediately states, in their very first paragraph, that, "teen childbearing can have negative health, economic, and social consequences for mothers and their children and costs the United States approximately $9.4 billion annually."

This is pure circular reasoning.

The idea that a child brought forth is somehow a drain on the treasury is a Malthusian, eugenic notion. Not too many people can justify fourteen -and fifteen -year old girls having children. But seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen-year old females are still technically teenagers. Why shouldn't they have children? Because they're not ready?

That's the cultural driver behind dropping fertility. Women are told to delay pregnancy until they have established themselves in the workplace. So women are waiting until their thirties to even look around for potential mates.

The reason teen pregnancy rates are falling is because Western fertility is falling. In 2013, the U.S. fertility rate fell to 1.86 live births per woman. Replacement rate is 2.1.

The cultural changes being pushed on women are contributing to declining fertility. The same can perhaps be said about the cultural signals that men are getting. The economy is shifting to more of a service economy, and men no longer expect to be the breadwinner and protector of their family. Men are expected to stay at home and raise children while their women go out into the world and make a living. That's why men are checking out, and that's a factor in declining fertility as well.

So excuse me for not celebrating the drop in teen pregnancy.