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Whodathunk? ;)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was just thinking in terms of attractiveness. Kids today have an unlimited supply of videos of beautiful people having sex. Not only are their expectations rising, but their choice of attractive mates is falling.
So they'd rather just watch porn than lower their expectations and have some sort of sex?
If I'm a 4 and I won't settle for less than an 7 (which is a step down from what porn is teaching me about averages), it's likely I'm not going to father many children.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So they'd rather just watch porn than lower their expectations and have some sort of sex?
It's not so much that they'd rather watch porn. It's that porn sets their expectations regarding what sex is and with whom they expect to have sex. If I'm a 4 and I won't settle for less than an 7 (which is a step down from what porn is teaching me about averages), it's likely I'm not going to father many children.
Isn't it typically "teen pregnancy" rather than "teen birth"? Is the nuance between pregnancy and birth significant? Also, this wording can seem confusing (i.e. you can't give birth to a teen!).
Births are what matter, as a pregnant teen can get an abortion, resulting in skewed statistics if you're trying to figure out how many teens are having babies, which (imo) is the thing society should actually care about, as unready parents tend to be a drain on collective/social resources.
That's true, but if your argument is the lower number of births is due to widespread availability of contraception, you have to address pregnancy and not just births.
I wonder how big a role obesity plays in all of this. It may be that teens are having less sex because so many of them have effectively taken themselves out of the sexual marketplace.
"The first is the most important and may be obvious: Today's teens enjoy better access to contraception and more convenient contraception than their predecessors, and more of them are taking advantage of innovations like long-acting injectable and implantable methods that can last years over a daily birth control pill. But the second cause is something that goes against the conventional wisdom. It's that teens -- des…
How much actual evidence is there that this has anything to do with contraception? I'm getting old now, and from what I can tell contraception was just as available when I was a teen as it is now.
On top of that, the stigma around using the pill decreases all the time. Parents are willing to get the pill for their daughters.
There is more access for contraception for women. Sadly no real changes for men. Although now you buy condoms online which reduces the stigma many young people have about buying them in person.
As of this post, three of the 20 comments on this story conjecture that obesity plays some role, and a full half of the comments are on subthreads discussing this hypothesis. Interesting because I've never heard this hypothesis before and other online discussion of this article does not mention obesity.
Isn't it typically "teen pregnancy" rather than "teen birth"? Is the nuance between pregnancy and birth significant? Also, this wording can seem confusing (i.e. you can't give birth to a teen!).
Teen pregnancy rates will be higher than teen birth rates in jurisdictions that are not hostile to abortion. But teen birth rate is probably a far easier statistic to gather.