Maybe so. And the analogy is illustrative of something. But taking God and predestination out of it takes away the role of agency or design, the sense that some will or intent is at work, and makes it just an observation of circumstance.

I’d hate to resort to ‘stuff happens because it happens’ because it is useless as analysis. I’m not convinced it is useless as truth.

Interesting if true, even for a subset. I have never seen or heard data on that. I might speculate that for some, the sudden onset of motherhood might sober them up fast and hard, and if they have any kind of support system at all, put them on a less stupid life path than the one they were on.

For those flying completely without a net, or not inclined by nature to notice the life lesson, it probably still makes life worse.

When measured against Same-Group Teens, Teen Pregnancy/Motherhood was associated with BETTER lifetime outcomes vs. same subgroup without the teen pregnancy.

Any theology that attempts to justify God’s ways to man is overreaching, and is also missing the point. Man is incapable of understanding God fully and has no standing to pass judgment on God.

But here on earth, poor girls are having babies out of wedlock and blaming other people for their problems. That’s humanity for you. The things we’re capable of figuring out we choose not to figure out.

The underclasses would have and still face no prospect of social death but single motherhood adds to their financial burden a fair bit, bu their lives would have been pretty nasty regardless, as described.

The only people whose social fate would have been affected so badly as to affect their economic position, maybe, were the otherwise prosperous middle classes, and the only people whose social and economic fates would have taken a real pounding were the lower middle class and upper working class. The classes with something to lose and a real chance to fall.

The classes that invented and most rigorously policed themselves for these kind of morals violations and, with some mild success, imposed the rules on society as a whole. For good reasons.

For the right- sometimes people’s failure to live up to certain behavioral standards doesn’t really damage their futures. Even if it’s because they had none to begin with. It still means all the moralizing won’t help. Also, some rudimentary sex ed is useful at puberty and they might not get it at home from unnecessarily twee parents in some cases.

For the left- It’s not about yet another revision in nauseating [really] detail of the sex ed curriculum. If you can’t get the message about pregnancy avoidance from one simple lesson, no additional lessons will help. Also, some people will have no future under any policy structure or, if they find one, it will be unusual and will be the result of efforts and conditions that could not have been predicted or facilitated by policy.

And the one thing no progressive in today’s America will say unless it’s about rural white people, and no conservative will dare say at all for at least the past 2 generations, all the above is OK. Even the “no future” part.

This is true of more things than you might think… Many times, we’ve got cause and effect completely turned around, and mistakenly think we understand situations that we really, fundamentally do not.