The Danish figure for percentage of teen pregnancies aborted is very high. I don't know, but it may be similar in other Scandinavian countries because they have similar low teenage birth rates.
Paradoxically it is those teenagers who stand to lose the most by having a baby that avoid giving birth. Those who believe their (economic) life chances are slender continue with the pregnancy (generalising here you understand).
Trying to slot NZ in there, in 2010 (our birth and abortion statistics have improved recently) there were 28 births per 1,000 15-19 year-olds and 22 abortions. This lines us up closely with the United Kingdom in 2003. So, assuming the miscarriage rate is also similar, 37 percent of teen pregnancies in NZ in 2010 ended in abortion. A long way off Denmark.
I am emotionally averse to abortion but when it means subsequent births result in children born to people ready, able and wanting to become parents the incidence of it is ameliorated.
5 comments:
Some alarming figures in that paper on US teen pregnancy:
***Even among women beyond their teen years, 35.2 percent of births
are to unmarried women. In fact, women in their teens represent 10 percent of all women giving birth; the number of nonmarital births to nonteens is three times
larger than the number of teen nonmarital births.***
This meshes with blogger Half Sigma's comment:
“Now, I strongly believe that the disintegration of marriage is one of the worst things to happen to the United States. However, a lot of the correlation between being born outside of marriage and doing poorly in school and not making a lot of money has to do with HBD. Low-IQ people have illegitimate children, and they pass on their low-IQ genes to them. So merely getting low-IQ people to marry each other won’t magically make their children smarter. But I do think that the two-parent family is much better for passing on middle-class values, which are important for an orderly society.
Furthermore, without the institution of marriage, alpha males have a disproportionate share of children, which means each subsequent generation becomes significantly more alpha than the previous one, and in just a few generations we will completely wipe out centuries of breeding for beta qualities, and it's the beta qualities which are necessary for civilization.”
Illegitimate births in the NY Times
In terms of the comment regarding "beta qualities", I suspect he is referencing Economist Greg Clark's work in "A Farewell to Alms".
The Indicted and the Wealthy: Surnames,
Reproductive Success, Genetic Selection and
Social Class in Pre-Industrial England
Our ex-nuptial birth stats are worse at almost 50 percent of all births.
HBD?
I think that is an abbreviation for human biodiversity.
Teen pregnancies are very common today is like a trend but it should be stop.
The teenage birth rate was considerably higher in the past but unlike today, many births were within marriage meaning a committment (not always successful) was made to raising the children together.
Post a Comment