Infant simulators don't prevent teen pregnancy

That's my body right now though, which sucks, and I can't share the burden with anyone yet - down to using up all the sample nursing pads due to leakage. Plus having to roll around in my office chair to go to the bathroom when I'm having a bad pain day. And nausea 24/7 (what "morning" sickness?). I know most folks have it easier than me, I got the shit end of some sticks (to the point my OB wanted me to take disability leave if I was still working).

I can only hope that most of this isn't permanent and that the actual birth isn't too traumatic.

Ten percent of the random alarm clocks should ship with no off switch at all, but not indicate that this is the case.

I don't know either, although wearing the simulator mentioned at the end of the article 24/7 for a few days might approach part of it. Maybe you can simulate the exhaustion by having an alarm on the vest wake you up every couple hours in the middle of the night, if you can even sleep with a 30+lb vest on! Bonus points if it can figure out how to kick your bladder right as you're about to sneeze.

I suspect I am a bit of an outlier though, as plenty of people have uneventful pregnancies. Although... I am finding that most of my friends experienced a lot of my pains and then forgot about it. Maybe mother nature will be kind enough to gaslight me so all I have are journal entries and HN/reddit comments complaining about this :)

There were pictures in the article of body suits that simulate the 3rd trimester.

Spot on. Turns out when you give away free IUDs, teenage pregnancy and abortion rates plummet. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/06/science/colorados-push-aga...

Condoms are on par with withdrawal? Do you have a source for that?

> Condoms ruin the sensation

Maybe my penis was shipped with a defect, but for me the difference between condom and no condom hasn't been that dramatic.

> you'd think a lot more people would be excited to adopt babies.

A couple things;

1. The primary barrier to people adopting babies is the insane expense and rigamorole involved (at least in the US). You might argue that the expense is justified, but it doesn't change the fact that it's extremely difficult and expensive. Plus, in some states, adoptive parents are given lower legal priority than the birth mother. I know a couple who had to give up a baby they adopted months earlier because the birth mother sobered up (temporarily) and decided she wanted her baby back. So not only a huge expense, but a huge emotional and financial risk as well. This is a by-product of the law, not of the difficulty of raising the child.

2. Despite this, most healthy children do get adopted. Most of the un-adopted children have physical or mental health issues that most would-be parents are not equipped to deal with.

I'm not saying that caring for a baby has no cost, but I think you argument ignores the largest challenges of adoption.

I think he was talking about the costs and long term commitment and decades long curtailment of freedoms rather than just the pregnancy.

That doesn't seem very practical to me. There is are deep emotional bonds with physical bases that begin in the womb - a baby learning his mother's voice and smell, the mysterious bonding that happens during the sacred hour after birth, such that months later mothers who went through it are more affectionate towards their children than those that didn't. The closeness of nursing, for which the mother's body is prepared. Sepatating child bearing from child rearing can be done, but it is hard on everyone. Denying people the joy of raising their own children is the sort of thing that people take desperate risks to circumvent.

Other elements of the plan are impractical. Should the child have a loving, mature father in his life? Are we now marrying teenage girls to older men, or arranging marriages between teenagers, or simply using sperm banks? Men want to raise their own children, too.

And this is an expensive proposal for the girls. Pregnancy and caring for an infant makes it hard to put a lot of effort into anything else - you spend most of your time resting, and in an emotionally turbulent state. Putting girls in this state for years on end, right as they are supposed to be ambitiously pursuing training in their chosen vacation is a great way to torpedo their odds of making it in their fields. And just as their children gain independence, you would have them begin helping with their grandchildren! Sounds to me like a recipe for never doing anything professionally.

There is more to life than avoiding minor health risks. The joys of marrying for love in maturity, raising your own children, and fully developing your own interests while you are young and ambitious - these are worth a little statistical health risk.

Interesting. I wonder how much we could improve the physical and financial health of society if caretaking lagged a generation behind birthing. At this point, such a social policy would be extremely difficult to implement in the west as we've not just discouraged but morally proscribed teen pregnancy.

Which is what I meant to say :)

Obviously teens are aware of the relationship, but contextualizing it within one's own life is hard.

The argument is that they were not careful because the educational focuses was on the negative consequences rather than on how best to assess/mitigate the risk.

Teenagers in high risk demographics already know what sort of hassle having a baby is because of the example of peers or family members or neighbors. What they're much less familiar with is what they'd be giving up (ie all the life opportunities that they lack the experience to model as available options), and this naive discounting of the future distorts their risk calculus. Rather than working to increase their weighting of the known-negative outcome by saddling them with $700 Tamagotchis, it would probably be more effective to reduce the actual risk with greater focus on contraceptive methods etc.

Most teen pregnancies are not the result of teens deciding to become pregnant, but most are the result of teens not deciding to not become pregnant.

(Similarly, very few people plan to fail, but lots of people fail to plan.)