Prof: As you undoubtedly
have noticed,
most of the course has been--I
sort of have a global focus and
mostly focused on foreign
countries with a fair amount on
Europe and very little actually
on America.
Now we've come to the part of
the course where we're going to
discuss social issues and those
are very country dependent.
What's a hot social issue
depends on the cultural context
and so we're going to use that
to do American issues.
With respect to reproduction,
one of the main--there are a
couple of main issues.
 
One, which is not quite as hot
as it was a decade ago,
but it's teen sex and teen
pregnancy.
Both as an ethical,
moral issue and as a practical
economic issue about the
children of teens.
How are they going to get
supported and what does it do to
poverty of the mother,
and you have some really good
readings on those.
 
The other one--the other topic
which will come next after this
is abortion;
we're going to spend two
lectures on that.
 
There's going to be a nice long
discussion of that because that
is really the hot topic.
 
Today is teen sexuality and
teen pregnancy.
Just to start with some data
and keep it local,
this is from The Hartford
Courant, last November
19,2008.
 
There's a national youth risk
behavior survey that monitors
health risk among high school
kids,
9^(th) through 12^(th) graders
all over the United States.
In Connecticut 42.4% of the
kids have had sexual intercourse
of high school kids and it says
31.8% are sexually active.
I don't know exactly what
active means so I guess they're
continuing.
 
There's a few percent that
didn't like it or something,
but there's quite a lot of both
onetime early sexuality and than
a continuing bout of it.
 
As part of the problem,
of those that have had sex,
or are sexually active,
37.3% reported that they did
not use any kind of protection
at the last act of intercourse
and therefore they're at great
risk for pregnancy.
That's just real sexual
intercourse, I guess as Bill
Clinton defines it.
 
When you go to oral sex you get
another set of numbers,
and oral sex as you may,
or may not, know has become the
big thing in America.
 
I'm sure that--we don't really
know the causes of it,
I'm not aware of any real
academic literature on that,
but the fear of AIDS there's a
perception,
which is true,
that oral sex is less likely
to--
not zero likely,
but less likely to transmit
AIDS.
And also because,
maybe--I don't know how much
you're aware of this,
but during the Bill Clinton
trials,
a very conservative prosecutor
Kenneth Star,
was talking about oral sex all
the time and everybody in
America learned about it and he
sort of popularized it.
 
As is often the case,
people that want to push an
idea in one direction,
end up having pushed it in
exactly the opposite direction.
 
Oral sex is alive and well in
New Haven.
I sometimes teach teachers how
to talk in their classes about
the kind of population issues,
the kind of issues we talk
about in this class,
and they give me a lot of
information.
 
One day I'm talking to these
teachers and they say,
'oh, something interesting has
happened in the school.'
In one of the local high
schools, a freshman girl,
was caught in the stairwell was
providing oral sex for a line of
boys.
 
They were standing there
waiting, a few of them with
their pants down,
and this girl was doing them
one after the other.
 
This is a freshman in the local
high school.
The New Haven Register
had a headline,
"Teens Turn To Oral
Sex," 10^(th) grade
students so that's high school
sophomores,
40% of the boys and girls
reported that they had engaged
in oral sex in the last year,
and about 25% that they had
three or more different oral sex
partners in the previous year,
so sex among teenagers is alive
and well,
as they say.
 
Here's your anecdote for the
day.
A teenager--so Hartford,
as you know,
is a very bad--there are a lot
of poor people in Hartford,
let's just put it that way.
 
Planned Parenthood has set up a
clinic in the northeast part of
Hartford, a very poor part of
Hartford, and this is from one
of the counselors there.
 
A teenager, a teenage girl,
comes into the Planned
Parenthood clinic there and
says,
'I'm pregnant,' and the
counselor says,
'oh how do you know that?'
 
She says, 'I not only know
that, I know exactly when I got
pregnant.'
 
'Oh?'
 
'Well I know that if you
only--if your boyfriend comes
only once, you can't get
pregnant."
But, on such and such a day,
and she named the date,
"we did it twice and I
allowed him to come the second
time and that's when I got
pregnant,
I know that's when I got
pregnant."
Because she was of the belief
that one time can't do it,
but two times will.
 
Well they took the test and
indeed she -- yes?
Student: 
>
Prof: Indeed she took
the test and indeed she was
pregnant but she had been
pregnant like two months before
she thought she was.
 
She had it completely wrong.
 
Student:  My mother
worked in the National Health
Service Corps in the 1970s--
Prof: Shout.
Student:  My mother
worked in the National Health
Service Corp.
 
in the 1970s in rural Colorado
and she had a 12-year-old come
in who was in labor and she
didn't know that she was
pregnant at the time.
 
Prof: Did not?
 
Yeah so that's--I don't know
that you heard all that;
her mother worked in Colorado
and a 12-year-old came in,
in labor, and she didn't even
know she was pregnant.
That's a story,
Colorado, Hartford,
it's all around.
 
In 1999, which was sort of the
peak of this concern about
teenage pregnancy,
450 Hartford teenagers gave
birth.
 
How many completed high school?
 
332 girls graduated from
Hartford City schools in that
same year.
 
So, one-third more girls became
mothers than graduated from high
school.
 
You can imagine this was
considered a serious problem.
Now what is this--the
social--the political,
the social, the school response
to this problem?
Well they're kind of hamstrung.
 
A nurse practitioner at a
Hartford school clinic said that
she's allowed to test and treat
students for sexually
transmitted diseases,
but she can do nothing about
the possibility of pregnancy.
 
She may not prescribe birth
control or even distribute
condoms in the school.
 
There was a proposal in the
city council to allow the
schools to distribute condoms,
and it was roundly turned down.
What is--why is--what is the
political concern here.
The political concern is what
you can see here,
that people who are opposed to
providing contraception for
teenagers,
including politicians,
this is an advocacy ad,
this is not an academic sort of
thing.
 
This is actually true,
that people believe that even
discussing sex will tend to
encourage it,
and certainly handing out birth
control will facilitate
teenagers having sex.
 
This is the political;
this is the opinion,
the kind of attitude that is
opposed to it and why the
Hartford school system and many
other school systems can't
provide contraception.
 
Of course this gets discussed a
lot and it's a topic of
discussion not only for the
parents but for the teenagers,
and one nice quote from Maritza
Lopez,
who was a Hartford public
school high school junior,
and she was already a mother.
 
She dismissed this idea saying,
"All the girls I know are
sexually active.
 
Most started in the 6^(th) or
7^(th) grade,
they're going to do it no
matter what."
Now I experienced this same
kind of attitude.
I was again teaching the
teachers, sort of teacher
training kind of stuff and I was
new at it, a little naīve.
This was Connecticut teachers
from all over the state.
Before I started,
I said, look,
we're going to discuss some
pretty heavy stuff here
involving sex and everything,
and I don't know how much of
this you can talk to your kids
about.
They roared with laughter!
 
What they all told me was
"all of our kids"--
they exaggerated,
I'm sure it wasn't all,
but the way they expressed it
was 'all of our kids were into
sex already'.
 
I can say anything that I want,
there's nothing that they're
going to be shocked by.
 
Some schools can do a decent--a
proper sex education;
some schools are not allowed to
do proper sex education.
A problem, even in the schools
where it's allowed,
is often the choice of
teachers.
It can be the Health Ed.
 
teacher or someone who may be a
jock, that has said,
okay it's your job to teach sex
education.
It's rarely that a teacher gets
to volunteer,
that they survey all the
teachers and say this is a tough
job, who wants to do it?
 
No, somebody gets assigned to
do that.
Then, you get the--very often,
the teacher herself may not
approve of sex education for the
children.
She may think it's not a proper
topic for a school for whatever
grade she's supposed to teach it
in.
She may--and I say she,
it may be she or he,
the teacher may be
uncomfortable talking about sex,
may not be well-educated on how
to handle questions about sex or
about contraception,
may also, very likely now,
be afraid of legal
complications or disciplinary
actions from the school if they
handle it wrong and they say the
wrong thing,
and parents start objecting,
which certainly happens,
and it happens in Connecticut
and I've been involved in some
of that stuff.
Parents coming in and screaming
and yelling at him or
threatening to sue the teacher,
it--happens.
In any case,
most sex education teachers,
as far as one has data,
which is very skinny,
the teaching of this subject is
just not coming from a person's
guts.
 
They're fulfilling a curriculum
assignment,
it's something that they are
assigned to do,
and if, in something of this
nature,
the teacher is not really--this
is not coming from her soul,
then its guarantee to be an
unsuccessful program.
We've seen things like this
before.
Remember when we talked about
the family planning program in
Pakistan and Bangladesh.
 
They started with the Daiyis
when it was one country,
when it was Pakistan,
and the Daiyis were the
traditional birth attendants who
themselves were not using
contraception,
didn't believe in it,
didn't know anything about it,
and could make more money
doing--attending births.
 
The program was a complete
failure until they changed and
started hiring women who
themselves were using
contraception,
some were high status and
really approved of it,
and then the program became a
great success.
 
You have to have consistency.
 
If you make a law,
or try to have a policy,
the people that are supposed to
carry out the policy must want
to do that.
 
If they don't really want to do
that, whatever your policy is,
in any area of activity,
it's not going to work.
Now this doesn't mean that it's
necessarily terribly difficult
to be effective,
the sex education.
Planned Parenthood,
for instance,
I used them as an example
because I know about them.
They do a lot of sex education
for the schools,
and often when the school is
uncomfortable doing it or
doesn't have anybody that they
think wants to do it,
or is qualified to do it,
they will call in Planned
Parenthood or one of a number of
other kinds of organizations.
Planned Parenthood has the
flexibility to hire people;
they don't have licensing and
so forth requirements--who are
really committed to this kind of
thing.
They did what they call a
seminar for high school
students,
again in Connecticut here,
I think it was also Hartford
and they got a letter back from
one of the students:
"Hello,
my name is Kelly and I was in
your seminar.
I would like to thank you for
making me aware of some of the
consequences of sex.
 
Because of your seminar I got
the courage to ask my mother for
birth control before something
happened that I would regret for
the rest of my life.
 
I also got the courage to ask
my boyfriend to use a condom
instead of nothing.
 
Thank you so much,
you've really honestly changed
my life.
 
I guess when the information
doesn't come from the teacher it
actually hits home.
 
Thank you, Kelly."
 
Now this is a teenager's letter
and its one anecdote,
so you can't make an awful lot
out of it, but you have to think
a little bit.
 
She says, "making me aware
of some of the consequences of
sex."
 
Well, do you think she really
didn't know you could get
pregnant from sex,
that you can get diseases?
No, she knew that,
that she had misidentified what
was going on.
 
I doubt--I'd be flabbergasted
if she didn't know that by the
time she was in high school.
 
What do you think?
 
You have a more recent
experience in high school;
don't all the kids know that
you get pregnant from sex?
Yes, and all know that you can
get a disease--an STD from sex?
Not so sure,
all right maybe Kelly
was--maybe I'm wrong and Kelly
was right, I don't know.
The thing is,
it's all in the way it's
presented.
 
If it's presented by someone
that really cares about it and
wants to do it,
there's just a whole different
atmosphere and kids minds open
up to this kind of thing.
Anyway, America is generally in
a mess with respect to sex
education and sex in general.
 
It's quite different than the
European countries.
So, here is a typical graph
that is presented frequently.
This shows the number of
children born to teenagers,
this is again at the peak of
the problem,
and here's France,
here's Germany,
here's Japan,
here's Great Britain,
and, Whooops,
here's the United States.
Student:  Is there a
graph adjusted for population
sizes?
 
Prof: Perfect,
that was the next question and
I'm glad one of you caught it
right away.
This is again--usually
presented like this,
it's an advocacy thing.
 
It wants to scare you;
it wants to show you how much
worse the United States is than
everybody else.
As we just got told,
the United States has a much
larger population then any of
these places,
so this is not really a
legitimate way of presenting the
data.
 
Of course, your dutiful teacher
redid it and here is when you
divide out by population and you
see it's not as severe as the
illegitimate graph,
but--the United States is still
more than twice,
has more than twice the
percentage problem;
anyways it's still serious.
In fact, they didn't have to
use the improper data they could
have used data like this and
still the problem becomes very
clear.
 
From a lot of studies of these
kinds of things,
it turns out countries that
have a very liberal attitude
toward sexuality have the lowest
teen birthrates,
teen pregnancy rates.
 
A place like the Netherlands,
probably in the west,
either Denmark,
or Sweden, or Netherlands is
probably the most liberal and in
those countries it's considered
a perfectly normal part of
teenage experience and the
teenagers are expected and
encouraged to bring their
girlfriend or boyfriend home and
sleep in the same room.
That may be starting to happen
in America--how many of your
parents would allow that?
 
A few all right we're--she's
married.
The U.S.
 
rate is 54 per 1,000 teens,
about one out of 20 each year,
and in the Netherlands the
figure is 7,
so eight times lower,
and it's a huge difference
depending on the country
attitude.
In academical discussions,
these things get terribly mixed
up.
 
There is a bunch of issues
which usually people don't
separate out.
 
One is teen pregnancy and
that's very different than
teen--can be different than teen
childbearing because not all
those pregnancies come to birth.
 
There's teen sex,
then you have sex,
you might get pregnant,
and if you get pregnant you
might actually have a live
birth.
So there's three different
steps, and when you're looking
at statistics you have to
separate those.
Another is the whole idea of
out-of-wedlock births,
births born to mothers that are
not married.
You can combine all
pregnancies, you combine those
two, out-of-wedlock teen
pregnancies.
When you read discussions of
this, try to figure out what
they're talking--which of these
problems they're about.
It's often not made very clear,
but it's very important to keep
it straight.
 
I'll try to talk about these
different things and make it
clear.
 
When you discuss this--one
issue is--what do the statistics
you're looking at refer to,
and I hope I've always been
clear in these slides.
 
The other, when you go across
nationally, like to other
countries, and it's not always
clear what marriage means.
In other cultures--in the West
in general and the United States
in particular,
a marriage is a legal statement
and it's an all or nothing sort
of thing.
You either have a marriage
certificate and you are married,
or you don't have a marriage
certificate and you're not
married.
 
And if you have one,
and you get divorced,
then you--in terms of you don't
have one anymore.
It's an on or off kind of thing.
 
Everyone really knows whether
they are married or they are not
married.
 
In other cultures,
marriage is quite variable,
it's a stage thing,
and it may have various steps
in the marriage.
 
For instance,
in Nigeria among the Fulani,
at circumcision,
a boy who's age seven to ten at
this time, is then betrothed to
an infant girl.
Sometimes betrothed is
translated as married to.
When the future husband--But
they don't live together.
When the future husband's
father learns from the girl's
parents,
who are living separately,
that she has begun menstruation
and then is believed to be
capable of childbirth,
the girl then moves into her
husband's--
her future husband's compound.
So they're still betrothed,
she's now menstruating,
so she moves in with the
husband, and it's still the
future husband and she's treated
as a daughter of the husband's
father's household,
she's treated like a sister of
the boy.
 
The boy and girl sleep
together, they have sex in the
open,
and the boy is usually in this
culture,
it's a herding culture,
they sleep outside near the
corral to guard the cattle
against raiders and wolves and
whatever kind of predator
animals they have there.
 
That's all done,
of course, very openly.
They still have the status of
an unmarried youth and a maiden,
where she is not a virgin
anymore but she's a maiden.
When the girl becomes pregnant,
she moves back to her father's
household and she stays there
for three wet seasons and they
have wet and dry seasons there,
so it's a
geological--climatological thing
and that takes two to two and a
half years depending on when
they've started,
and then she returns to the boy
and only then are they
considered married.
 
There are so many different
steps and then they are
officially married.
 
Using our definition of
marriage applied to the Fulani,
since they always have that
first child and until it's two
or three,
when they're not married,
basically all Fulani first
births are illegitimate births,
by our accounting of it.
 
Among the Dogon people,
which is Mali and Burkina Faso,
a girl doesn't move into her
spouse's home until the birth of
the second or even the third
child.
Speaking of that,
in Sweden, I lived in Sweden
and we have a guest whose son is
in Sweden,
when I was there,
the tradition was building up
that you get married on the
birth of your second child.
Is that still happening or--
Student:  No,
they actually don't marry
before the first child.
Prof: Her own son,
but that's because he is a
foreigner.
 
In China they have an
interesting system.
In the old days,
in some places,
that I don't think I described,
where they have child marriage,
they marry a boy to an older
girl and the older girl then
acts as a kind of nanny and
takes care of the boy until they
grow up.
 
But they're legally married,
but he's five years or old or
something,
and she takes care of him until
he becomes--
she's a surrogate mother until
he becomes sexually mature.
 
One of the explanations for the
low rate of Chinese fertility
within marriage is that boys
rarely have sexual interest in
their sisters,
at least not for long,
and so this kid grows up and
this girl,
older girl, has been taking
care of him and by the time they
get married there's no sexual
interest hardly at all.
So the rate of intercourse is
very low and the birthrate is
very low and we talked quite a
bit about that.
Also in traditional China men
can take many wives and men can
take concubines.
 
And they can take slaves,
and the distinction among all
these categories is not very
clear,
since marriage is usually not a
government function but they go
to the local Buddhist shrine and
do a variety--
or Taoist shrine and do a
variety of different practices
depending on the woman.
 
One of the most common ways--so
the marriage--
the first--There will often be
a first wife,
not necessarily the first woman
that's taken into the household
for the sexual relations with
the husband but what's called
the first wife and she will be
prominent.
And then there will be all
kinds--depending on how rich the
person is, a variety of other
women.
Apparently one of the frequent
things is that the degree of
importance of the marriage
depends on how public the
ceremony was.
 
If there's a big public
ceremony with lots of relatives
and neighbors invited,
then it's very clear,
this is a very clear--
this is what we would call a
marriage.
 
In other cases,
a woman is just taken in the
middle of the night and brought
in the house and there's never
anything public done whatsoever,
and she lives there as a sexual
partner for the husband and you
can call it married or call it
not married,
she lives in the house probably
until she dies.
 
This marriage again is not an
all or nothing kind of thing,
it will start out with
different levels of status,
and then during the course of
the marriage the status can
change.
 
The husband may become enamored
of the wife and in various ways
raise her status or degrade her
status and so forth.
Now in poor communities,
everywhere--
you read about this in Brazil
and among people of the United
States,
a formal marriage has,
sort of, almost disappeared and
it's replaced by various
informal unions.
 
And these informal unions,
where there's no legal status
whatsoever no--
the word marriage is just not
used,
the state of the relationship
between the man and the woman is
sort of negotiated daily.
It can change all the time,
that it's not--again not a
fixed thing but a very floating
kind of relationship.
Even in the United States of
course marriage is not a uniform
legal situation.
 
Each--marriage has a state law,
it's not a federal--
you don't get married in a
federal situation,
you get married in a state
situation,
and so there's 50 different
situations altogether,
and we have prenuptial
agreements which arrange the
financial relationship between
the man and his wife,
or vice versa,
and so that can be different.
In other places even more
issues than just financial are
arranged by private contract.
 
It's not set by law,
but by private contract between
the marrying parties,
or more likely between the
marrying families.
 
A friend of mine,
whose daughter went to college
in Egypt, went to The American
University in Cairo.
I was going to say she fell in
love with an Egyptian guy,
but I don't know that.
 
They had sex,
I don't know whether they fell
in love or not,
but she got pregnant and the
girl decided to get married.
 
Her parents were divorced and
the girl's father wanted to have
nothing to do with it.
 
So, there was the mother,
she had to do something about
it, and she was opposed to the
marriage.
But the girl didn't listen,
so they were going to go ahead
with the marriage.
 
Now in Egypt,
at that time,
you have to have a marriage
contract and that specifies all
kinds of rights that the woman
has.
What rights does she have in
her children?
Without that specified in the
marriage contract,
they were totally the
husband's.
If there's any divorce or
anything, the husband gets them,
there's no legal case
whatsoever.
What are her rights to travel?
 
Can she travel by herself?
 
Can she go abroad?
 
Can she travel around Egypt by
herself?
What are her rights to
residence?
What are her rights to child
custody and so forth?
All of this had to be specified
and there was no husband to do
it,
so guess who played--ersatz,
I played the role of the father
and helped negotiate this thing,
very interesting.
 
Each marriage means something
different in many places.
You can see that in the DHS
surveys,
The Demographic and Health
Surveys that I've shown you,
it never uses the word
marriage, it says 'in union,'
that's because 'marriage' means
so many different things or
means nothing at all.
 
Now it's often perceived that
teenage pregnancy and related
social problems are--
from graphs like that are
either uniquely American or more
extreme in America,
but it's not the case.
 
For instance,
in Japan, of women who are
teenagers at their first birth,
82% became pregnant before
marrying.
 
Of women age 20 to 24,58%
became pregnant before marrying.
And, of all women,
26% became pregnant before
marrying.
 
In other words,
if a Japanese woman got
pregnant before her late 20s she
was probably unmarried at the
time that she got pregnant.
 
These numbers are--well are
numbers that have actual--have
live births.
 
As you'll see in the next
lecture, Japan has an extremely
high rate of abortion,
so these numbers are way--these
are the women who carry the
birth to term and probably,
at least these are
underestimates by a factor of
two because this doesn't take
into account abortion.
I've assigned you reading that
discusses this issue from a
whole variety of perspectives,
and I guess I don't have to
tell you what it is because
you'll do the reading.
A little bit of the biological
background to these issues and
some of this,
I don't have to tell you about,
because you were teenagers
yourself very recently.
Several things happen at
puberty and there are tremendous
physical changes,
you've noticed this.
There are tremendous
physiological changes,
I'm sure you've noticed that,
and there are even tremendous
emotional changes which of
course you guys wouldn't know
anything about because you've
been studying too hard to pay
any attention to this.
 
Evolution has clearly designed
to have this incredible eruption
of the ability to get
infatuated,
to fall in-love,
to have sexual emotions,
and it all comes on like a ton
of bricks at puberty.
This is not by chance,
this is not by culture;
this is straight old mother
evolution doing these things to
you.
 
Simultaneously with this,
especially in males,
there's an eruption--it's not
absent in females,
a great eruption of revolt
against parental authority.
When you were a little kid you
did whatever mommy says,
more or less.
 
When you're a teenager,
no go, there's competitiveness,
there's aggressiveness,
there's violence,
it onsets at puberty and all of
this is to set a place in the
dominance hierarchy.
 
Of course we are,
in the West,
well aware of these incredible
emotional outbursts and there's
tons of literature about this of
which probably the most famous
is Romeo and Juliet.
 
Anybody take a Shakespeare
class?
How old are Romeo and Juliet
supposed to be?
13,14, something like that and
what did their great
overpowering love cause them to
do?
They killed themselves over it.
 
Very purposely,
they could not live without the
other--with their partner.
 
This emotion is extraordinarily
strong, even stronger then the
desire to have life.
 
Now adolescent sexuality is
more or less disruptive
depending a lot on the culture.
 
Probably the one most important
variable, is,
how much teen sexuality is
allowed?
Does one have an outlet for
these emotions?
If the culture allows an
outlet, in of a variety of ways,
then it's probably easier for
the adolescent to accommodate
this.
 
If, like our culture,
in principle,
we're not supposed to have an
outlet for this,
then the tensions build up and
strange things happen.
Different societies handle
adolescent sexuality very
differently.
 
You read the Om Gad
story about the Egyptian woman
and that is one way in which
traditional societies handle
sex.
 
You remember that her sexual
initiation began very early;
it began before puberty,
if you remember that.
It was introduced with what she
perceived to be a fair amount of
violence.
 
Remember on her wedding night
she had no clue what was going
on and the women come and
investigate her before the
marriage ceremony and it must be
an extremely scary business.
Even before that,
the women in Egypt,
all those--well that was only
one woman you read about,
they all had clitorectomies,
which again you read about
there.
 
There's a lot of violence
involved in teenage sexuality in
a lot of places.
 
It's moderately common,
at least in traditional times,
that marriage and first
intercourse precede puberty.
In Iran, for instance,
a few years ago Iran raised the
legal age of marriage to the age
of nine.
I may have mentioned this in a
previous lecture,
and the conservatives were very
upset about this,
and they were opposed to this
because they considered that
raising of the marriage age to
be much too liberal for Iranian
society.
 
The reason that they chose the
age of nine was that Mohammed
married his favorite wife,
his second wife,
Aisha, when she was nine.
 
Again, I warn you,
that getting married doesn't
necessarily mean the onset of
sexual intercourse.
We don't have any idea what
happened there,
but getting married,
like the five year old boys in
China getting married does not--
you don't know what the means
with respect to sex.
 
Just that a contract has been
decided upon and,
at some stage,
sex will take place between the
two.
 
With respect to this bill,
parliament actually passed it--
later on they did raise it to
nine and then a further bill
came in to raise the age from 9
to 13, but that was blocked.
The Guardian Council,
which is the conservative
religious body,
and they thought since Mohammed
got married at nine that you
couldn't do anything different
than that.
 
Now in many parts of the world,
until very recently,
if a girl got into her late
teens or certainly early 20s
without being married,
it was considered a disaster.
Then she was--by 20,
much too old and she would
never get married,
she would be a spinster for the
rest of her life.
 
These cultures had--most
traditional cultures had various
prescriptions against premarital
sex,
sex before marriage,
and this has several very
important functions.
 
One is to ensure the paternity,
if you're married and you got
pregnant,
then the society can be pretty
sure of,
or at least can assume legally,
that the father--
that they know the father,
and therefore the economic
responsibility for the child is
very clear.
 
That's one the reasons to have
a fixed legal status of
marriage.
 
Back then marriage and puberty
were essentially the same,
pre-pubescent girls were
all--post pubescent girls they
got married at puberty and
that's it,
so a lot of these languages
don't have words that
distinguish between maiden,
in the sense of a young girl
and virgin in the sense of a
girl who has not had sex.
There's a large theological
discussion in the Bible when the
Virgin Mary--
was she a maiden or a virgin
and the language maybe doesn't
distinguish between these two
kinds of things.
 
Another prohibition against
premarital sex,
since puberty and marriage were
often very tightly tied,
that the prohibition against
premarital sex was really
intended,
in many cases,
to protect girls from
pre-pubertal sex.
What was--had originally that
goal,
to deal with pre-pubertal sex,
if you retain the legal aspect
of it until the women marry much
later,
it doesn't anymore have that
kind of function whatsoever.
Teenage childbearing was very
common, illegitimacy was very
common, so the earliest records
we have are from the 1600s and
the Chesapeake Bay Colony;
way back then guess what
fraction of women were pregnant
when they got married,
of married women what fraction
were pregnant?
Make a guess for the 1600s,
Chesapeake Bay Colony.
Student:  Eighty-five
percent.
Prof: What?
 
Student:  Eighty-five
percent.
Prof: Thirty percent,
which is very similar to the
numbers that we've had until
recently,
it just seems to be almost a
constant.
They have fairly decent records
through American history and a
lot of histories and the rates
of premarital pregnancy seem to
go up and down.
 
There seem to be large
increases in the late 1600s and
around 1725 to the earliest
booms of premarital pregnancy
and I don't have any idea what
the cause of those are,
but you can go to our professor
of colonial history and try to
find out.
 
How were these--why were these
not a social problem these
premarital pregnancies?
 
Because what happened then?
 
They got married and those
kinds of marriages are called?
Shotgun weddings.
 
Have you all not heard that
word 'shotgun weddings'?
You get pregnant first then--in
principle the image comes from
the girl's father carrying a
shotgun saying,
'You're going to marry my
daughter aren't you?'
Those are standardly called
'shotgun weddings'.
I think I've mentioned to you
that if the mother didn't get
married,
either because of her
unwillingness or the guy's
unwillingness,
then she had a real problem,
because in the Anglo-American
tradition it was not the family
that had responsibility,
the village had responsibility
for the unwed child to--
both the mother and the child
it had to support,
and for all these villages
living on the edge of
subsistence this was not--
this was a very big burden.
I think I mentioned this,
the stories of pregnant women
being chased from village to
village so that they would not
have the child in the village
because then,
ever thereafter,
that child is the
responsibility of the village.
 
Another thing to keep in mind,
that we talk now a lot about,
is single parent families and
what a bad problem this is.
It turns out that the
prevalence of single parent
families has always been very
high.
In the 1700s,
for instance,
this is a quote from a history
book,
"One the main
characteristics of European
urban households in the
eighteenth century was the large
proportion that were headed by
women."
In Rheims under the Ancien
Regime,
in France before the French
Revolution,
one out of four homes was
headed by a woman and 15% to 25%
in all the towns for which they
have data on this.
In the U.S.,
the prevalence--the big divorce
boom came after the 1950s in
America,
but it turns out that the
prevalence of single parent
households at the end of the
twentieth century was almost
identical to that at the
beginning of the twentieth
century.
 
What was the difference?
 
At the end of the century,
single parent households were
caused by either lack of
marriage or divorce,
but at the beginning of the
century death,
death of one of the parents.
 
What has happened is that
marriages on average didn't last
very long in traditional times,
because one of the parents
would die;
the death rates were so high.
They coped with single parent
families because of death,
and now people psychologically,
apparently,
are not attuned to staying
together for long times,
or even getting married in the
first place.
So, now that situation has
changed so that now it's sort of
voluntary single-parent
families, but the numbers
surprisingly have changed very
little.
It's another one of these
things that I've talked about in
history where things change from
being outside of human control,
like whether you're married or
not,
whether you're going to be a
single parent--
outside of human control are
brought into human control,
it's in some sense under human
choice.
What has changed in the modern
West with respect to all of
this,
and is now spreading everywhere
is that children are not
supposed to get married as
teenagers.
 
If you had gotten married in
high school, probably every
single one of your parents would
have really been very upset by
that.
 
Of course in the old--In the
essence, it has to do with
education.
 
In the old days you were a
peasant,
you were a farmer,
and things were done the way
they had always been done and
little kids,
starting at age five,
six, seven started going into
the fields with his mother or
his father,
or both of them,
and watching how the farming is
done.
 
By the time he was a teenager
he had probably learned how you
do things because it's done
traditionally.
There was no science to it,
there was no quantification or
arithmetic involved in this.
 
This is the way you did it.
 
When the moon is at such and
such a phase,
they have to do this,
you start planting and so
forth, and you learn all that.
 
There was no need for the--no
economic need to have a lot of
education.
 
Now of course that's turned
around completely.
Even farmers definitely do not
do things in a traditional
manner;
it requires a lot of education
to be a very efficient farmer,
and so we need a lot of
schooling for whatever we do,
so we're not supposed to get
married until our schooling is
finished.
Your parents would not only
have been mortified if you got
married in high school,
but they probably would be
mortified if you got married
before you graduated college.
How many of you think your
parents would be very happy if
you got married now?
 
How many of you are married?
 
One, two sorry,
two of the TAs are married and
they're--TAs are moderately
married.
Now mostly I teach biology
majors and we all know when the
biology majors grow up.
 
Is it when the get their MD or
is it when they finish their
residency?
 
That's the big issue and they
generally don't get married
before that.
 
Now we have to do a little
quantification of all of this,
so here is the crux of the
problem, and this is in 1890.
Menarche of course is the onset
of the menses,
and presumably more or less the
time of beginning of fertility,
and that was at about 15 years
of age.
Now with presumably increased
nutrition,
although the reasons are still
somewhat questionable,
the age of menarche is now
12.5, so this period has been
extended forward.
 
The age at marriage was 22 in
1890, the average age of
marriage for women,
this is for women.
The period was still
fairly--between the onset
presumably of sexual desire and
the "legitimate
realization"
of it,
at marriage,
was about 7.5 years and then
very rapidly a first birth would
occur.
Now what happens is you go to
1988, menarche becomes earlier
and marriage becomes a lot
later, and now both these things
have expanded even more.
 
Now the period of time between
the onset of adolescence and
sexual desires and marriage,
becomes longer and as time goes
on this gets longer and longer
and it's the same story for men.
We don't have good early data
on spermarche,
but marriage is even later than
for women, so for men is 12.5
years.
 
That's a very long period of
time in the lifecycle of a man
especially,
not much less for a woman,
and especially during the
fertile years say 15 to 40,
like 25 fertile years this
is--or 35 this is half or
somewhat less than half of your
total fertile period is
premarital.
 
Quantitatively,
that's probably where the
social issue comes up.
 
Way before 1890s,
in traditional societies,
menarche and marriage come at
the same time,
there's no real interval there
so there's not a social problem
of what to--
the social problem is what to
do with sexuality in this
interval here.
In traditional times,
when our religions grew up and
most of our cultural
presuppositions grew up,
there was no period,
or extremely little period,
between the onset of
adolescence and marriage.
As time goes on and the need
for education increases,
that period between onset of
adolescence and marriage grows
longer and longer.
 
There becomes this very long
social period in which,
by some social conventions,
you're not supposed to have
sex,
the child is still a child in a
sense,
not supposed to have sex but
the biology is telling them that
yes they want it very much.
Societies have had,
Western societies especially,
but the rest of the world is
not any different,
have had a long--have had a lot
of trouble and are still in the
middle of having difficulty with
deciding what to do with this
period.
 
What are the morals,
what are the ethics,
what's the religious attitudes
that should take place about
sexuality in these periods.
 
This whole lecture basically,
this whole problem of teenage
sexuality is due to that problem
there.
Now if you look at the time
what has happened,
what has happened to sexuality
in this period?
Well what do you think has
happened to the frequency of sex
among teenagers,
unmarried teenagers?
Up, well yes that is correct,
here's data,
this data is not--you want to
bring the data more up to date
but we just don't have it.
 
Here's women starting in 1956,
after World War II,
there's a very conservative
period in America where the war
was very disruptive,
they had the big depression,
then the war.
 
People wanted to go back to a
traditional way of living:
a little white house in the
suburbs,
a man and a wife,
and a white picket fence around
it,
and the fraction of teenage
women--this is teenagers,
having sex was like still a
quarter--
more than a quarter so it was
not zero by any means.
 
Then as time goes on it goes
higher and higher and now it's
sort of doubled the rate.
 
Not now, this is 1980,
late 1980s, so we've progressed
another 20,30 years since then
and it's just continued to creep
up.
 
This is for females and this is
for males showing the same
thing.
 
So, yes, indeed,
sex has increased.
No question about that.
 
What do you think has happened
to the teen birthrate?
This is really what people
don't realize.
During that same period,
when the frequency of teen sex
was rising quite noticeably,
the teen birthrate went from 80
or even 90 in the middle 1950s
during--
where that other graph started
in the middle of this
conservative period there was a
very high teen birthrate,
and then it's gone down and
it's continued on down,
it's now down to about this
level, about 40 currently.
These graphs were all done
during this period of peak--its
being at peak as a social issue.
 
This bump here,
where it raised temporarily,
was significant.
 
You're going from 50 to 60 or
something, which is a 20%
increase in teen births.
 
No one really knows what that
is, but sort of the presumption
it was the Reagan and Bush 'just
say no' period,
where social programs to combat
pregnancy,
largely sex education,
were frowned upon,
were put down and the result
was an increase.
That's very conjectural,
we really don't have a way of
finding out what caused that but
since that's over--it's come
back down and continued to fall;
every year basically the rate
of teen pregnancy gets less than
the previous year.
It's still a big problem.
 
Of course I showed you in the
first graph, there's still about
a half a million teenage
pregnancies each year.
That is, in the American
context, about half what it used
to be,
but in the world--it's
middling, it's more than in
Europe and less than in a lot of
other countries.
 
If you break this down,
this decline in teen
childbearing you can average it
out, it's 1% a year,
kind of continually,
since the 1950s.
In the last 50 years teenage
pregnancy has dropped on average
1% a year very,
very consistently.
You can break it down.
 
It's dropped in all 50 states.
 
If you break it down
geographically,
it's dropped in all ethnic
groups, you pick your ethnic
groups, the teen pregnancy rate
has fallen.
Especially during the peak of
the crisis, there was a special
worry about poor teenagers,
and at that time that meant
mostly black teenagers.
 
The rate of drop of teen
pregnancy among black teenagers
has been about twice the rate of
drop among whites,
so they've come much closer
together.
It's not only childbearing,
but actual pregnancy rates.
This is childbearing rates,
if I put up pregnancy rates it
would look pretty much the same.
 
Now we've got a problem here.
 
We've said that the rate of
teen pregnancy something like
doubled and the rate of teen--
sorry the rate of teen
sexuality somewhat doubled,
yet the rate of teen childbirth
went in half,
so there's a factor of four
that we have to explain.
 
What we think should have
doubled in fact went down by a
factor of two.
 
What is the factor here?
 
What do teens start to do?
 
What?
 
Student:  Married more.
 
Prof: They what?
 
Student:  Married.
 
Prof: No,
no marriage--I'll show you
marriage in a minute.
 
In fact I will show you
marriage, good that's a good
point.
 
This is marriage rates for
different ages and here is women
in the prime age of marriage.
 
This is the marriage rate--in
1960 marriage disappears,
marriage falls off the face of
the cliff.
Student:  Birthrate.
 
Prof: I'm sorry
birthrate, yes sorry my mistake.
The birthrate drops
tremendously and what happens in
the early 1960s to cause that?
 
Student:  The pill.
 
Prof: The pill,
the birth control pill,
so this is a pure technological
effect.
This kind of drop,
we've seen this for China,
and when Mexico legalized
contraception you get these
drops.
 
This is 15 years it goes from
250 down to less than 125,
it drops by a factor of two in
15 years, an enormous drop.
This is all a technological
drop due to the availability of
modern contraception,
and the pill in particular.
We've seen that kind of--That
means that,
at this point in time,
when the birthrate was one out
of every four women every year
of fertile ages,
that's a very--that's a pretty
high rate.
That means that--I mean the
other social indicators don't
change so much,
like the economy or the amount
of female education or anything
like that,
not so rapidly.
 
So this means that at that time
there must have been a fairly
large desire to stop
childbearing,
but there wasn't the technology
available and so as soon as the
technology is available the
birthrate drops.
Now for teenagers,
here's age 15 to 19,
you also get a drop also at the
same time, but it's much more
gradual.
 
Why is that?
 
That's--
Student:  I'm sorry,
if I could ask you a question,
have you factored in the
legalization of abortion which
took place in--
Prof: The legalization
of abortion is probably this
blip down here.
 
No, that's later,
that was 1973 so that's down
here,
the fertility drop
is--contraception gets legalized
in 1965 and abortion in 1973,
so it's too late for that but
the availability of
contraception and the
legalization of it.
So, in 1960 contraception
between married people is not
legal.
 
It was in 1965,
so partway through this drop,
that it became legal but it was
used very heavily.
As in China,
with the one child policy was
just rampant ignoring of the
law.
It was the Supreme Court case
that was fought--
there was a Connecticut case,
the Planned Parenthood of
Connecticut did the
contraception law,
did the case that made
contraception legal for married
people and it was later that
unmarried people got the right
to have contraception.
 
The birthrate drops for married
women,
but for teenagers it drops much
more slowly,
and that's the tradeoff between
that they're having more sex so
you expect it to go up,
but they're using
contraception,
so it's going down.
Whereas these women,
married women at that age were
having sex before this period,
so what you see is all the
contraceptive effect and there's
no increase in sexual frequency
to counterbalance that.
 
This is you would expect--well
this would be--
this is the full contraceptive
effect,
this is the contraceptive
effect minus the increased
sexuality effect.
 
We know that something like
three-quarters of sexually
active teenagers,
and this is for a long time,
used contraception and they're
amazingly good--
they're not dumb about it at
all.
They, in general,
use contraception at least as
effectively as adults and in
many--
in several of the studies,
they used contraception more
effectively than adults.
 
If contraception hadn't come in
at that time,
you would have seen a
tremendous rise in teen
pregnancy,
in teen births,
whereas, in fact,
you saw a gentle,
a 1% a year,
a gentle drop in teen births.
Cross-national studies show
quite convincingly that the
drop--
that the moderation of this
drop that why teen pregnancy
didn't rise when teen sex rose
was due to contraception.
 
In Canada, U.S.,
Sweden, France,
Great Britain,
the age of sexual debut doesn't
change very much when you go
across these countries.
About 40% of the 15 to 17 year
olds have already have
intercourse and this rises to
70% to 80% among 18 to 19 year
olds.
 
In fact, the U.S.
 
had a significantly lower
percentage of girls who had
intercourse in the past three
months than--at the year this
was taken, say 59% in the U.S.
 
and 79% in Sweden.
 
So we had less sexuality than
the other countries.
Even though we had a lower
amount of sexual activity,
the teen pregnancy rate,
the teen birthrate,
the teen sexually transmitted
disease rates were much higher,
and again, if you compare the
use of contraception in Europe
it's much better than here and
that explains all these problems
with the sexuality.
 
Non-use of contraception in the
United States was five times as
great as that of Great Britain
and three times as great as that
in Sweden.
 
The effect is not concentrated
in lower economic groups,
that's a somewhat interesting
fact,
almost everything else breaks
out by economic groups,
and contraception use among
teenagers doesn't vary that much
among different economic groups.
 
Now--so what's the problem here?
 
We start out that there was
or--and still there appears to
be a huge problem with teen
pregnancy and--
but we see that in actual fact
the data contradicts that.
Teen pregnancy has been
declining rather steadily,
1% a year for the last 50 years
and is now half of what it used
to be.
 
There's a whole discussion,
we can discuss teenage abortion
rates, but what has happened is
the disappearance of shotgun
weddings.
 
This data is pre-maritally
pregnant women,
this is a somewhat wider age
range,
not teenage but 15 to 29,
and what fraction got married
before the birth of their first
child?
They're pregnant before this
graph happens,
sometime later they may,
or may not,
get married,
what fraction of them get
married before the birth of
their child?
They're pregnant,
the child's born,
and do they get married in
between?
Traditional shotgun wedding and
here--there it is,
it's getting bad.
 
You can see it was fairly
stable for many years and then
boom it just falls off,
that's white women,
here's total women you can see,
Hispanic, and black women.
What disappears,
it's not an issue with sexual
activity it's an issue with
marriage.
That the problem is that
marriage drops much faster than
the teenagers or anybody else
can cope with.
What happens,
and here is the source of the
problem,
that even though the teen
birthrate during this period is
declining,
the non-martial teen birthrate
is rising and that's one of the
things that people always don't
distinguish between.
It was this,
the non-marital teen birthrate,
that was making real social
issue.
It was not the total birthrate,
but the unmarried birthrate.
This was enough of a social
problem,
but without the teen use of
contraception,
the problem--remember we
thought we should have seen a
doubling of teen pregnancy and
we saw a halving,
a cutting in half,
so there is a factor of four
difference,
this would have risen four
times as fast without teenage
use of contraception.
Again that's the--we started
with it--that's one of the big
social issues:
Should teens be given
contraception?
 
And I think the data here shows
that,
I don't make any kind of moral
statement or ethical statement,
but that if they don't have it
than non-martial teen birthrate
is going to be fantastic.
 
Question, I thought somebody
raised their hand?
No.
 
Okay now you have the
reading--there's all kinds of
programs that are supposed to do
something about teen pregnancy
and you'll read about this.
 
One of these is virginity
pledges, the abstinence only
programs, various conservative
measures.
There's now good studies of all
of these and none of them work
and the information on that is
in your reading.
Here is the story on--with this
drop in marriage,
and this is all women,
it's not just teenagers.
Look at the rise in unmarried
births.
It's about a third of all
births are to unmarried women of
all ages and that's continued on
in a slow rise since then.
This is kind of a huge sea
change in American childbearing
practices.
 
It's going from almost always
within marriage to a very large
fraction outside of marriage.
 
Here--so this is the
birthrate--so mostly among older
women, it's rising,
over 40 its low but rising.
35 to 39 it's rising.
 
30 to 34 slightly rising.
 
25 to 29 a little bit rising.
 
And the only group that's
having a lower birthrate are the
15 to 19 year olds.
 
You can see that their line is
definitely sloping down,
so this marriage problem--this
is the change in birthrates and
the only one that's having a
smaller birthrate are the
teenagers.
 
This is now the unmarried
birthrate and here you see,
again 35 to 39 year old women
very much increased,
again the 30 to 34--the
different ages,
all the ages of women have an
increasing rate,
an unmarried birthrate,
except the teenagers.
Here's the 15 to 17 year olds,
they are falling down,
and here this dark blue line is
18 to 19 year olds,
so whether it's 15 to 19 that's
the only group in America in
which unwed childbearing is
going down.
Student:  Is this a
percentage or is this just a
proportion, or a total number?
 
Prof: Rate per thousand.
 
I don't know if you can see
this, its rate per thousand,
ten per 1000,20 per 1000,40 per
1000.
Student:  Do you know if
the programs from 15 to 18 year
olds is successful at all or is
it--
Prof: No,
the data has been--most of the
programs work on younger kids
and--
Student:  Is that why
it's not going up as much as the
others?
 
Prof: That is in debate.
 
No, no the abstinence programs
no.
There's two sets of programs
competing,
one are abstinence type
programs, virginity pledges and
the other is sex education
programs and you have to have a
very good study to figure out
what's going on for any
particular group of students.
 
I put in your reading packet
some of the best studies of
this.
 
Here's another interesting sort
of factor,
that if you break teenage
birthrates out by state in
America,
the red states have the ten
highest rates and they are the
south,
the south belt here.
 
The most conservative and
most--and the ones with the
lowest it's New England,
New Jersey, upper Midwest,
the most conservative and the
most religious parts of America
are the ones that have the
highest teen birthrate.
Again, you have to be careful
about over-interpreting this
data because what you might--
they get married young there
also, so a fair amount of this
is marital teen birthrate,
and again the data isn't
readily available.
At least I haven't been able to
find it--what you're worried
about is the un--or you think
you're worried about is the
unmarried teen birthrate.
 
Not a lot of people--some are
worried about teen birthrate,
period, because it means people
are not getting it--
the teenagers are not getting
education and so forth.
Like most other things that the
social practices in the more
conservative regions of the
country lead to a very--
a lower age of when people have
births and not surprising at
all.
 
Now I want to expand this
internationally a little bit,
so we've talked about America.
 
Here is the country and this is
teenagers--
who have ever had sex,
two different columns,
and one column is male and one
column is female,
and I cut off by mistake which
sex it was.
Is it obvious which sex is
which here?
The left column you'll notice
is consistently larger than the
right column,
so it should be pretty easy to
figure out which is male and
which is female.
Student:  Male is left.
 
Prof: Male is on the
left, how many people agree with
that?
 
How many people think it's
going to be the opposite?
Why do you think it's going to
be the opposite?
Student:  Because when
they're consistently get married
and have--
Prof: What?
Student:  Women are
going to consistently get
married and have sex,
whereas men in a polygamous
society might have to wait
longer.
Prof: Right,
exactly right.
Here it is, the first column is
indeed women,
so you see now the point is
very different considerations
come in.
 
This is all an effect of age at
marriage,
and so here is the complete
graph as it was published,
and notice the fraction of
teenage men that are in union,
almost none.
 
Remember we talked about that,
that the old men keep the young
guys from getting married,
and these are about 25% across
the countries are in union with
men who are older,
therefore they've had more sex
than the young males who have
not had the opportunity to have
sex.
So this is part of what I've
described before about the power
structure and the money
structure,
that the old men keep the young
men in a kind of a state of
frustration and the females have
sex earlier.
Now you can look at different
countries and a lot of people
again,
this discussion of sexuality is
very often tied in with ideas of
religious morals and you can
look at Ireland,
you can look at religion,
you can look around the world
at countries that have different
religions and one of the most
Catholic countries is Ireland
and more than half of all babies
are born to mothers under 25 so
they have a low age of birth,
and about half of those are
born outside of marriage.
 
If half your babies are born
before you're 25 and half of
those are illegitimate that
means that all the babies,
just from the young women
having babies,
that's 25% of your total babies
are illegitimate.
When you add in the
illegitimacy of children born to
women over 25 then it--the Irish
comes to equal or exceed the
U.S.
 
rate of about one-third.
 
If you compare the Irish
illegitimacy rate to white
American women,
which is in some sense the
proper comparison group,
the Irish rate's way higher,
about 50% higher than the
American rate.
Now you go to the other side,
New Zealand is an old fashion
Protestant country.
 
It has the--a very retro
feeling when you visit it.
She was--you've been there
yes--they--38% of all births in
New Zealand are out of wedlock.
 
In England it's nearly 40% of
births and they have the same
problem,
a third of marriages end in
divorce and ever-increasing
numbers of people see marriage
as just an irrelevant thing and
don't bother.
In Japan, I think I gave you
these things,
26% of first births are to
women who conceived before
marriage.
 
In Japan, and I guess I
mentioned this before;
they have such a high rate of
abortion that you can't tell
very much from the actual
childbirth rates.
We're coming to the end,
we are at the end,
and there's lots more to say.
 
Let me tell you one more thing.
 
The whole pattern of
childbearing is changing
drastically, especially in
poorer communities.
It's very difficult for poor
people to bring up children
because they just have no money.
 
What's happening is who
actually brings up,
say, largely black children in
America?
Is it the mothers?
 
It's the grandmother,
a very common pattern.
I don't know if--it's that the
grandmothers are bringing up the
children and we get up--the
white dominant group gets upset
by this.
 
But actually it's a split
between the biological act of
parenting and the psychological
and economic act of parenting.
The kids get married--get
pregnant quite young,
but they're probably
biologically very capable of
pregnancy at the ages at which
they get pregnant.
In some sense,
from a biological point of
view,
getting pregnant in your late
teenage maybe a biological
optimum,
but they are not
psychologically prepared to be a
parent and they're not
economically prepared to be a
parent.
 
Who is most stable
psychologically is probably the
mother's mother,
the grandmother,
who will be 35 or 40 in a time
when you're sort of more or less
emotionally stable,
you haven't gotten into old age
yet,
and whatever degree of economic
stability you're going to have,
which is never going to be very
great,
is strongest at that age.
In a sense, it's a very
rational kind of split that you
do in your lifecycle.
 
You do your biological
reproduction at the age when
you're most capable of that,
and, at a later stage,
when you're most psychically
and economically capable,
you do your psychological and
economic parenting.
There's also this and because
of that, there's been big
debates in America about
welfare.
Does welfare encourage
illegitimate births and they go
on the public dole.
 
This is especially discussed,
either openly or covertly,
always referring to poor people
and often to minority people.
Well, if you actually look at
the economics,
the amount that women get on
welfare is really very small.
Where is the major--And not
enough to allow you to stay
alive and bring up your child.
 
Where is the economic
sustenance coming from?
It's coming from the
grandmother.
It's the grandmother,
the young girl and certainly
the baby will often live with
the grandmother.
She pays the rent,
she has a job.
The welfare is not coming from
the government,
that's a small amount.
 
The welfare is coming from the
grandmother.
There is welfare involved but
it's a within-the-family kind of
welfare.
 
It's really this system of
having the grandmother take care
of the kids and economically
support the kids that is what
enables a large degree of unwed
teen pregnancy in poor and
minority communities.
 
Okay we will--from that lecture
we will go on to abortion next
time.
 
