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The issue with encouraging teen pregnancy is that two teens can’t raise a baby together- can’t earn enough to support a family, and generally need at least one real adult in the couple for a variety of reasons.
You can get around this by either raising the age of first pregnancy or normalizing at least a subset of teenagers going with adult men. Our society is very squeamish about the latter solution, and I do not think it’s viable without bringing back arranged marriages, which in turn means, basically, getting rid of women’s lib, which has far reaching society wide consequences.
Young people have low earning power but punch above their weight at taking care of kids.
You still need money, so this is something an extended family (or a village in Hillary Clinton terms) can do. But I would be extremely sus about a community that deliberately keeps its young women pregnant. It leads to Warren Jeffs situations very easily.
I think there’s enough historical and foreign examples that we can safely say that it’s possible to have a functioning, high equilibrium society in which girls/women marry in their teens very frequently, and to say that most women/girls are capable of adjusting to and fulfilling a wife and mother role by their mid teens with little inherent difficulty.
I do think there is a completely negligible amount of evidence against the received wisdom that girls and young women are incapable of making wise choices about who to partner with.
I also think there is a very negligible amount of evidence against the received wisdom that men/boys are incapable of fulfilling a father/husband role until much later in life than girls are.
It seems completely reasonable to the point of being self evident to me that ‘girls are married off in their teens to older men’ basically means getting rid of women’s lib.
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