Pregnancy: the new "disability"

Just read an article "Pregnant, and Pushed Out of a Job". The author seems to take a lot of things for granted and thinks that women should be entitled to a host of different things:

1. She can be less productive, and still get paid the same as everyone else. When a worker in a company does less work, everyone else has to pick up the slack. So while she's doing less work, everyone else is doing more, and yet everyone apparently should be paid the same.
2. She can keep her job despite there being many other unemployed women out there who are more reliable, who do more work, and who may need the money even more than she does.
3. She can avoid many of the job responsibilities (like heavy lifting and climbing ladders) and thereby shift the burden onto her co-workers, with no reduction in pay, and her employer is also not allowed to fire her.
4. She deserves special treatment because she's a single mother. Even if she deliberately chose to become a single mother. Her employer is to pay the price for the decisions that she has made. Her employer is responsible even if it was beyond her and her employer's control (her husband died or had an injury, for instance).

The author also wishes to blackmail us by saying that if they are not granted all of the above, they will inflict their dysfunctional children upon society by not breastfeeding them. Never mind that breastfeeding should be ideally done for about 2 years.

Then there is the plea for charity: "Pregnancy-related accommodations also promote economic security for families." Why this is should be an employer's problem is never explained.

There also seems to be a bias against hiring women with small children. You don't say!

Apparently, pregnancy is a disability. And this is the only "disability" that the victim deliberately inflicted upon herself.

Depends on the industry, but employing pregnant workers is generally worse for a company's bottom line. Contrary to the author's claims, there is more turnover, not less. There is less loyalty because more-productive workers are being paid the same as those who are less productive, and because they have to pick up the slack for no extra pay. And for obvious reasons, productivity is reduced. Morale is reduced. There are also more overhead costs associated with hiring and firing more workers.

But the problems associated with employing pregnant women aren't limited to the workplace. Employed women don't get married (to men; they get married to the government instead). They choose to become single mothers. Their children don't get breastfed adequately, and get put into daycare. And so on.

There is also the claim that making workplace accommodations for pregnancy results in healthier pregnant women. Ohkay, but making workplace accommodations for dolphins results in healthier dolphins. And making workplace accommodations for non-pregnant workers results in healthier non-pregnant workers. But given a choice between pregnant women, dolphins, and non-pregnant women, why should the employer prefer the pregnant woman?

There are some important voices that are not being heard.

1. What do her co-workers think? Are they inclined to take on additional work (like heavy lifting and climbing ladders) for no extra pay?
2. What does the employer think of the increased costs involved?
3. What do the customers think of  having to pay more because of higher costs associated with employing pregnant women?

There are some things that are impossible to articulate thanks to the climate of political correctness.

1. In a normal family, the man is responsible for earning the money. The woman is never under any obligation to earn money, unless he is disabled and can't work (in which case the family could be eligible for welfare). This idea is not so far-fetched. It was the norm in the stable nuclear family structure of the 1950s and previous.
2. The majority of single mothers today deliberately made choices that resulted in their single mother status. Either they chose to become single mothers, or they chose unreliable men. Only a minority of women are single mothers for reasons truly beyond their control.

What's wrong with "teen marriage" and "teen pregnancy"?

Why was teen marriage and teen pregnancy never a problem until recently?

The current debate about these actually refers to three different types of situations:

• The man and woman are both teens
• The man is a teen and the woman isn't
• The woman is a teen and the man isn't

It's obvious that the first two situations are bad. The third one? Not so much - it should be obvious.

So when social scientists point to statistics that show that teen pregnancy leads to bad outcomes, it's a generalization, but whereas most generalizations are empirically true, this particular generalization obscures some very important details.

The first (and currently the most prevalent type) was very prevalent throughout human history, if you consider that "middle-age" in the middle ages probably meant 20 or 25. One reason is the lower life expectancy (however...). However it's important that when we talk about the first type, we distinguish between then and now. Males were ready for fatherhood much earlier in the past. Still, even in their teens, the man was almost always older than the women. Nowadays male "adolescence" often extends into the 20's and 30s.

The second type of pairing was never anything more than a rare anomaly at any time in human history. The reasons can be found in evolutionary psychology. Women's fertility has always depended on age (fertility decreases with age). On the other hand, men's fertility has also mostly depended on age but in the opposite direction (male fertility, as in status, increases with age). This meant that women were drawn to older men, and men were drawn to younger women.

The third type of pairing was the rule rather than the exception throughout all of human history. What actually happened over the last 100 years, is that the third type of pairing became less prevalent. One of the reasons probably has to do with the recent taboo of older men marrying younger women which is compounded by delayed male maturity. So now this is an almost nonexistent demographic. Which is unfortunate because this is actually better than the other two. The high divorce rates of today probably can be traced to women marrying relatively younger men as one of its causes.

If we look at actual numbers, we can see why the claim that "teen pregnancies" is bad is misleading. Suppose that:

• there are 100 of the first type, and the child outcomes of these pairings on a scale of 1 to 10 is 4.
• there are 10 of the second type, and the child outcomes of these pairings on the same scale is 6
• there are 10 of the third type, and the child outcomes of these pairings on the same scale is 8.
• there are 1000 of the "normal" type (neither man nor woman are teenagers), and the child outcomes of these pairings is 8.

So on average, the "teen pregnancies" have an average outcome of (400+60+80)/120 = 4.5. While the average outcome of the "normal" type is 8. From this, our intrepid social scientists proclaim that when a teenage girl marries a non-teenaged man and has a baby, the outcome is worse for their child (because it's a "teenage pregnancy") than for a child born to parents neither of whom are teens. Sorry but I'm not buying that.

It's obvious from the above that the stability of the family has always depended on the quality of fatherhood. So "teen pregnancy" isn't the problem. "Teen marriage" is also not the problem. "Teens marrying teens" is the problem. More precisely, "teen fatherhood" is the problem, or even more accurately, "adolescent fatherhood" is the problem. A man in his 20s without a job who plays video games all day and lives with his parents doesn't magically have fatherhood potential just because he isn't a teenager any more. A child of an adolescent male, no matter the age of the mother, is almost always at risk.

Consider that that before a couple of hundred years ago, a person's age wasn't even an issue. Most people didn't even know how old they were. Most people couldn't even count past 10. They got married when they were ready. The only reason a woman waited at all for marriage was to wait for a man with high status. She didn't wait just because she was a teenager. Men too married when they were ready (able to support a family). They didn't wait until they were 18 or any other age.