It’s ironic that teen pregnancy is considered a problem in modern culture.

Think about your great grandmother, how old was she when she married and had her first kid?

My great grandma was 15 when she married and 17 when she had her first child. This practice was commonplace during the early twentieth century. In fact, early female childbirth was the accepted custom for every culture and time period, ever.

That is until contemporary values deemed it problematic or immoral.

Granted the reasoning and logic of having a child very young made more sense in primitive eras.

From an evolutionary perspective if you’re living on the African savannah thousands of years ago you’ve got a short window in which you can give birth and still have time to raise a child.

In the Middle Ages you might die of any variation of disease probably before your 25th birthday, so naturally it’s instinctual to procreate prior to kicking the bucket.

Obviously I am in no danger of death by lion or perishing at the hand of the Black Death. I have no need of spreading my seed young, my life expectancy is significantly longer than it would have been 200 years ago. Yet it doesn’t change the thousands of years of programming telling us to have sex and give birth shortly after puberty.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m certainly not advocating teen pregnancy, it brings a lot of unnecessary hardships that could be avoided. It’s also unfair to you and the child if you aren’t ready to be a parent and willing to make the sacrifices required.

That being said, I simply find it hilarious when right-wing extremists perched atop their lofty soapboxes dole out judgmental verdicts on those with “far inferior life values,” labeling this generation as unscrupulous heathens.

Well, newsflash: human nature is unscrupulous. We all possess the ability of performing unspeakable acts, just as much as we possess the ability to create good. Genocide and hatred exists. So does kindness and unselfish behavior, teen pregnancy and drug abuse exists too, they always have and they always will.

Maybe if people would kindly and briefly descend from their ivory towers and dwell with us commoners for awhile they could recognize that.