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PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   30516 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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One interpretation (not from the study, mine and perhaps the Tenet Health CEO's) suggests if you don't get murdered, or into a car wreck, or overdose, or kill yourself, or your mom didn't attempt a home birth at age 16, you actually have good survival odds. The best in the world. The health care system can actually help you. That's what that $10k/capita is all about.

Are teenage girls giving birth not covered by their parents' insurance?

I've been informed by LLMs that, despite how biblically popular it is, that teenage women are still physically immature and giving birth is higher risk as well.

See also other underclass issues raised separately in replies.

Think selection bias here, not causation. Especially given that teen pregnancy has become "more unhealthy" ever since it was relegated to a vice of the lowest of the underclass.

Pointing to biology is like suggesting that Lincoln Navigators must have a design defect that causes drive-by shootings and running red lights.

that teenage women are still physically immature

A minimum of 200,000 years of evolution (this stretches much further back than mere humanity, so this is probably closer to 225 million years of evolution) suggests otherwise, though of course that depends on what you mean by "physical maturity".

An organism that dies after copying itself once is obviously going to be less fit than one that stays alive to copy itself multiple times. If we assume that it was common (outside of the last 100 years... but a lot about the last 100 years is anomalous) for women to get pregnant quite soon after that was physically possible, and they died at outsized rates (because it would injure their body too much in an age where medicine did not exist), then we should expect that the average age of "ability to survive a pregnancy" [which is probably not what you mean by 'physical maturity'] should match the average age of "ability to get pregnant" reasonably closely.

And, for the most part, it does; whether an LLM (or the society that trained it) believes biological truths about maturity are secondary.

and giving birth is higher risk as well

Probably explained more by the demographics of who is more likely to do this than anything else (and the fact this is more likely to be handled through unofficial channels; it is irrefutable evidence of a quasi-capital offense in the modern West, after all). Other than that serious confounding factor, environmental endocrine disruptions and better nutrition may be able to push the age of "able to get pregnant" under "able to survive pregnancy" more often, but we don't have good data on that which isn't statistical noise and modern medicine is miraculously effective at trivializing the health risks of pregnancy (I'm not convinced the youngest documented mother survives that pregnancy 1000 years earlier).

I mean, it's an LLM. I suspect that giving birth at 16 and giving birth at 22 have identical risk profiles if everything else is equal(and obviously sixteen year old mothers and twenty two year old mothers are different populations), but ChatGPT is not very eager to point out that sixteen year old births are dramatically lower risk than thirteen year old births(which was widely recognized as extremely dangerous so far back as to be an aside in Romeo and Juliet).

There are very few teenage girls getting pregnant and on insurance. Teen pregnancy exists but it's an underclass thing outside of deep rural parts of the south where damn-fool girls get pregnant on purpose to marry their boyfriends(these girls are not giving birth in a closet).

Now medicaid exists but the underclass is, as a rule, bad at paperwork. You can just show up to a hospital to give birth and then not pay the bill they give you(this is your right as someone present in the USA), but pregnant teenagers mostly don't know this.

At the end of the day I suspect most teenage home births are the end result of trying to hide a pregnancy from parents(or, as is more likely to be the case, parent), and that the girls who attempt this are almost definitionally bad at future planning(see 'pregnant teenager', 'believes she can hide having a baby')

I'd expect they'd be railroaded into an abortion if they tried. "Ohh, we'll have to report this... or we can just make it go away for you"

Most of the teen births that actually happen seem to be the "gave birth in a toilet because she was so obese nobody realized she was pregnant" sort.

I think what is meant there is the occasionally reported situation of the (often heavily obese, or else it would be too obvious) teenage mom and her family being in denial of the pregnancy right until birth, and then it's too late.

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