Hacker News Reader

Comment by nemo44x | Hacker News Reader

It’s because we don’t follow it up with shunning and shame if a pregnancy occurs. Essentially cancel culture Victorian style.

So of course if you tell kids not to fuck and they have a million outlets to help burden the consequence then it’s a non-functional system not in coherence with todays reality. Living in the past is useless. But it doesn’t mean the values of the past are bad. Just incompatible with modern society.

View on HN

Rather than baselessly asserting this, why don't you ask a pregnant teenager (or someone who was pregnant as a teenager) whether they were shunned or shamed?

I think you'll find that most experienced one or the other, and probably both. Being supported by your parents and other authority figures is the exception, not the norm.

No, in the olden times this didn't work. Women were shunned and shamed when out-of-wedlock pregnancy occurred, and not only was it common, it was so common that there were multiple institutions set up by religious organizations that such women were forced into by their families where many of them died from the mistreatment. Check out "mother and baby homes" where thousands of unmarried women and children died.

But it was the mother's and bastard's fault, so their suffering goes in the "good" column. not the "bad" column.

It's all about perspective.

To the degree these "solutions" (in all their varying degrees of effectiveness) did not solve the problem they intended and caused new harms, then yeah, those values and mechanisms of social control are bad.

I saw a lot of this in my school. This is a great way to cause lifelong and generational harm to families.

What is "this"? Shunning?

Yes.

Judging by rates of illegitimate pregnancy and birth as reflected in prosecutions of same before and during the Victorian era, those values were incompatible with the society of their own time, too. Odd that never seems to noticeably deter the "forward into the past!" crowd from no-true-Scotsmaning their favored social prescriptions every bit as loudly as the most ardent communist handwaves Stalin.

It’s on a completely different level today and it’s not even close. How many babies are born out of wedlock? Now multiply that by a huge number to get the number aborted. It’s massively different than it was. Rates too I’m sure. Sex without consequences has been the siren song of the last 60+ years and for good reason if you take care.

And I didn’t say it’s a solution because it’s not. It’s good advice for various reasons but it needs to be supplemented with lots of knowledge on how to protect yourself too.

> How many babies are born out of wedlock?

Your argument would be better[1] if you supplied the numbers instead of assuming them and then arguing from the consequence.

1. ie: work

Last I checked, rates of out of wedlock pregnancy are down. What confuses the issue is total births have fallen even faster.

But frankly married couples regularly having 10+ kids wasn’t something to celebrate.

Really though these are the kinds of statistics people love to mess with. Do you count rates of pregnancy for unmarried adult women, or rates of unmarried pregnancy out of the adult/total population, or even rates of unmarried pregnancy out of the total number of pregnancies? Why not look at them all and pick whichever one supports the point you’re trying to make…

> Last I checked, rates of out of wedlock pregnancy are down.

What on earth? When did you last check that? Percent of births to unmarried women has gone from 5% in the early 1900s to 15% by 1980 and then ballooned to 40% this decade

https://www.statista.com/statistics/276025/us-percentage-of-...

> Percent of births to unmarried women

Again, that doesn’t mean the rate of unmarried women having children has increased because the rate of married women having children has declined. Similarly the percentage of married women has fallen dramatically. And of course the US in 1900 is hardly the beginning of time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com