Glorifying Teen Pregnancy is a Luxury Belief

Source: Glorifying Teen Pregnancy is a Luxury Belief Publisher: Cartoons Hate Her | Author: Cartoons Hate Her Published: February 4, 2026 | Archived: March 21, 2026

This account has since been suspended, and I have a suspicion that he was trolling anyway, but this tweet is simply a really extreme version of what’s going on through some of the darker corners of pro-natalist social media. Please don’t “nobody is saying that” me. Plenty of people are, in fact, saying that.

Perhaps accurately, many pundits in the improve-birth-rates-at-all-cost space have realized that the drastic reduction in TFR is at least in part to a reduction in teen pregnancies. While some more reasonable people have sought to find ways to raise the birth rate among legal adults, others have simply suggested that we “destigmatize” teen pregnancy. Nay, “normalize!”

In case you think I’m completely making this up, very-legitimate-journalist and friend of the ‘Stack Jane Coaston has also noticed it. Alternative theory: she’s just as crazy as I am, or maybe she’s a Beautiful Mind style hallucination of mine, but I doubt it.

Entrepreneur Palmer Luckey recently stated that women are “supposed” to complete their childbearing years between 16 and 18. Also, the famous IVF pro-natalist meets Amishcore couple, Malcolm and Simone Collins declared that to raise the birth rate, we must “remove the stigma associated with teen marriage and pregnancy.” An actual teenager responded with this:

Some pundits (such as conservative commentator Matt Walsh, who later tried to scrub these comments) have suggested that teen marriage is the key, and that the drawbacks of teen pregnancy are really the drawbacks of single motherhood. I concede that on a macro level, married teen mothers and their children probably fare better than single teen mothers and their children. But take the 1960s for example—while people like Walsh might cite the “good old days” vis-a-vis teen marriage and pregnancy, the 1950s and 1960s were unique in this sense. Your average woman married in 1960 was younger than your average woman married in 1920. But even so, despite how relatively uncommon divorces were in the 1960s, teen marriage was a clear risk factor for divorce. Per the CDC, referencing statistics from the year 1969: “27 percent of the women with teenage marriages were known to have been divorced within 20 or more years, as compared with 14 percent of those who entered first marriage after they had reached their twenties.”

This trend hasn’t really changed. The Institute for Family Studies confirms that marrying before age 20 is associated with a significantly increased divorce risk within the next five years. This doesn’t mean everyone has to wait as long as possible. Marrying at thirty is no “safer” vis-a-vis divorce than marrying at twenty-five. You could certainly argue that this is a correlation, not a causation, and that in better financial circumstances, teen marriages would do well. But for better or worse, there are almost zero upper middle class teenagers who get married in the first place, so this theory remains purely hypothetical. And the few publicized cases aren’t great. Conservative politician Sarah Palin’s daughter Bristol famously got engaged to her boyfriend after an unplanned pregnancy at seventeen—they called off their engagement and she is now divorced from her next partner.

In a best case scenario, the normalization of teen pregnancy (which won’t work, by the way) is putting the cart miles ahead of the horse. We have a bunch of much-more-eligible potential parents (many of whom want children!) who just aren’t meeting at all. It’s suspicious that anyone would prioritize the normalization of teen pregnancy over the normalization of asking an adult out at the gym, or simply providing tax breaks or cash incentives for new parents. I’d be the first to admit that the birth rate decline is pretty difficult to tackle because it’s so multifaceted and in part driven by increasing standards of quality of life that make people happier, at least in the short term, but that doesn’t mean I can’t say when an idea is stupid. And attempting to “destigmatize” teen pregnancy is, I fear, very stupid.

There are times when I wonder if none of these people are even serious. A while ago, I jokingly postulated that we could raise the birth rate by having a council of elderly aunties organize all the isolated twenty-somethings into softly arranged marriages. I was kidding, mostly making a point about how anything would be better than the dating app ecosystem. Perhaps some of these people are kidding too. But there’s enough of a propaganda push that I think we’ve gone beyond the point of “I was just pretending to be stupid as a joke.”