It may be normalized to wait on kids and pregnant teens have it tougher but it's not the end of the world. My mom had her first kid at 17 and we turned out fine.
I'm just weary of the leap from, 'it's harder and you shouldn't do it' to a stance that says, 'you are ruining your life and people who have kids at an early age are __________', *insert negative connotation*.
This thread feels like the latter. Judgemental. Meanwhile, our history is filled with family disowned because they made a mistake. Too much worry about what people say, not enough love.
I saw a Twitter video of 6 generations of women, walking past the camera, saying 'come on mom'. I can't find it but it was beautiful. Waiting until your 30s is a western civilization thing and it comes with it's own set of problems.
Having kids at an early age is difficult, for many reasons. Not least of all because humans are shit. It worked well for my mom because she relied on my grandmother to help out. But what if the general job market didn't treat mothers as trash? As if kids were a big inconvenience? That's not a putting your penis in the wrong place thing. That's a people are greedy dicks.
Adequate early child care would help a lot of people, including young single mothers but we can't have that. Pull yourself up by your fallopian tubes. Early, universal child care would let them go on and thrive. And reduce the stigma.
Affordable college would help single young mothers out but same reasons. We don't want to find solutions. Adequate transportation? Nope, got to keep black people out of certain neighborhoods. Hell, pull out an AR if certain people enter your gated community.
Like, we know why it's hard but trying to change the system is harder, even if it would protect kids, which we can easily agree is a worthy endeavor.
But we've decided to give up on that and lay the burden on kids responding to natural hormones.
In summary, I wouldn't advise having kids at an early age but I remember being a kid. I had sex before I was ready to care for a kid and I got lucky. But it's not the end of the world and I would love to leave that bullshit judgement back in the past. The biggest problems to teen pregnancy ain't the teens. It's rich people wanting lesser government.
It's the assholes who decided sex Ed isn't a good thing or don't want to give out condoms for free. It's the jerks who decided you can't get universal maternity leave or even paternity leave. It's the assholes who decided to raise minimum wage 2 dollars over 20 years. It's definitely the Fuck Bois who don't want universal health insurance.
And it's us, joking about it instead of realizing the truth.
The USA is fucking broken. As well as a lot of other western ciivilizations.
