"Teen pregnancy" is a very misleading term, because "teen" is overly overlapping with the age range that people can expect to marry. I read somewhere that the word "teenager" was not used until 1941. Traditionally, Age 13 is in adulthood, meaning the benefits and responsibilities of adulthood, such as marriage, children, get a job, etc.
On a website of the Filipino pro-life forum, I saw an amazing comment that promotes increasing the number of teen pregnancies. The human point is that more people can marry younger, and more people will enjoy making babies during the angry hormones of adolescence. As a pro-lifer, I certainly agree that many people should get married younger when they are ready, and really many more people will enjoy starting their family while they are young.
It adds to the natural rate of population expansion in 3 profound ways:
It naturally accelerates the natural expansion of humanity, by allowing the growing population to combine their growth over a short period of time. People can be grandparents literally in their 20s. In the next generations that are faster and closer together, the population grows faster.
This allows a larger portion of the general population to be sexually active, with more people having babies.
This allows for many years of reproduction, so that families can be larger and children are still born while the children themselves are growing and having their own children.
All of these effects are extremely efficient. As a pro-lifer, I have no method of imposing population control, so I am okay to allow exponential natural growth to compound faster. Although liberals insist that as the human population grows, many people should be sexually active. I have no objection to so many people pushing baby after baby after baby. And I believe people enjoy having more years of reproduction, and starting their family while still young, when they are ready.
Of course these pro-lifers have large families and are pretty okay with a denser Philippine people. I think pro-lifers tend to agree that human life is beautiful and fascinating, and thus further population expansion is probably a good thing to allow or encourage.
I am okay with many "teen pregnancies" if they are willing to get married and accept their family responsibilities. And many people can be good at getting married younger. Often if the family has money or a family business, then young spouses are guaranteed to have a job or income to support their growing family. And allowing many people to start their family while still young, allowing people to learn responsibility rather than being responsible as a rebellious society wants to pretend that adult adults are still “young” although it is clear that they have a natural ability to reproduce children, which biologically identifies them as adults and not children.
A very large Filipino family. Most of the world does not use birth control, at all. And many large families in developing countries, may have started in the so-called "teenage" years. Since I belong to a very large number of people who have resistance to birth control, I have no expectation that people should “space” their babies or limit their childbirth. I believe that humanity should grow and spread naturally, and that people should be free to enjoy having baby after baby after baby.
By the way, my family is among the many people who have practical, philosophical, cultural, and religious objections to all methods of birth control. I believe that people should prevent the natural growth of their number of children, rather than that, as the Bible says, be responsible for their families.
