Fox News Senior Medical Analyst Marc Siegel made some eyebrow-raising comments lamenting that birth rates are down among teenagers aged 15 to 19.
On Thursday, the National Center for Health Statistics reported that the U.S. fertility rate fell to another record low. The agency reported that the number of births per 1,000 women of childbearing age declined from 53.8 in 2024 to 53.1 last year. The latest figure represents a continuation of a decades-long decline in fertility rates.
Siegel joined Friday’s edition of America’s Newsroom, where Dana Perino said that while the continuing trend is not surprising, “the numbers might feel a little shocking.”
Just makes us easier to subjugate.
Teen moms are way more likely to drop out of school, which kind of snowballs into lower paying jobs, more financial stress, higher poverty rates, that whole thing. There are also real health risks involved, especially if she’s younger, stuff like preeclampsia and anemia are more common, and sadly maternal mortality is higher too. A lot of teen moms also end up pregnant again within a couple years, and depression and anxiety are pretty common outcomes as well.
For the kid, preterm birth and low birth weight are more likely, and as they grow up there tend to be more developmental and behavioral challenges on average. One of the more striking stats is that daughters of teen moms are significantly more likely to become teen moms themselves, and that cycle is really hard to break.
Dads kind of get left out of the research, but the data that exists shows they face a lot of the same economic and educational setbacks, and they’re less likely to stay involved with the child long term.
Let’s just break this down as a little reminder:
- 15: statutory rape
- 16: statutory rape
- 17: statutory rape
- 18: creepy
- 19: creepy
I am a little confused why everyone is forgetting that teens have sex with other teens. >.>
It’s not creepy for an 18 year old to have sex with an 18 year old.
I didn’t forget, but it is old white men hyper about this, and considering how many old white men are creepy around teens, suddenly being interested in them getting pregnant is extremely creepy.
Teens will always have sex, sure, although many fewer are as compared to previous decades. I’m not so worried about them.
Also… do we REALLY want teens getting pregnant?
That is just being racist as countless studies show this is a human race issue not a white men only.
Blocked. I don’t fuck around with white supremacist bullshit.
In brief, the people I’m talking about ARE almost all old white men. It just shows who you are that you leap to defend them.
Need more teen parents to make vulnerable children for the pedo conservatives.
WTAF. 15-19. That is some very weird shit.
We need to go back to a well-funded, high-profile and concerted campaign of calling the right weird.
Because they very much are.
They are the party of the pedo-in-chief. Of Bannon. Of Stephen Miller. Of Peter Thiel. Of Musk. Of Curtis Yarvin. The authors of The Sovereign Individual and The Unhumans.
Well tell them to be more sexy.
“Pedophilia has been trending downward since epstien files were mentioned…”
I get the sentiment, but this is much more likely due to teenagers smartening up about sex with other teenagers.
Remember when they said that sex ed would increase teen pregnancies? And now they’re low enough, because of sex ed, that they have to tell kids how fun it is to fuck without condoms
Its a a big fucking circle jerk
Sooo more life destroying, unplanned underage pregnancies?
They need more poor kids from broken homes to feed their slave pens (prison).
More teens became smart and self aware enough to not get pregnant in so young age by effectively using different types of contraception. And guy says that this is a bad thing. What?
This is the same group that decries teen mothers who are Black as burdens on the system and trying to cheat welfare by having more babies because more babies means a bigger welfare check that they can spend on lobster, fur coats, and Cadillacs.
Sick pro-pedophilia bastard
Nowhere in the US can 15 year olds legally consent to sex. The age of consent is 16, 17, or 18 depending on the state. This moron is literally supporting child rape.
They can consent to other 15 year olds
didnt know that (im not in amerikkka so idk the details of their laws)
I have a female coworker and her daughter is currently eight months pregnant at 14 with a 17-year-old father. She couldn’t be happier. She is also a hardcore republican and a diehard Trump supporter.
Ruin your kids life early that is the republican motto. Trap them in never ending wage slavery.
Yep exactly, it runs in her family. She was pregnant with her first baby at 15 and her husband was in his early 40’s. Her husband is older than her dad by 5 years. She is currently 41 and her husband is 73. She also has a younger sister like 5 years younger and I believe she basically did the same thing being pregnant at 15-16 with a much older man.
My wife has one branch of her family where 4 generations occured in a 60 year period, the 5 generation photos are pretty neat, and also I’m really happy for the last generation which broke the cycle.
Being a teen mom sky rockets the chance your children will become parents as teens
Yep, my best friend had his first child at 17 and now that child is 18 with 2 kids already.
WTF
I don’t like your coworker.
Sounds like she has a sweet trailer.
Actually, no, she lives in an old rundown house that has a bunch of Trump Flags and signs and she lives across the street from a Mexican restaurant and she absolutely hates the Mexicans, but loves eating there every night.
Mentally insane
Damn these (slur) and their delicious food and beautiful decor and lovely music! Damn them! Get out get out get out! And dont come back! (But i would like a refill on my horchata please)
That is almost 1:1 what she says.
I hate them as real things, but thryre amazing jokes.
I knew someone who was by her own description baby-crazy as a teen and basically seeked out someone to knock her up. Hormones are wild things sometimes. Her child did not repeat the cycle fortunately
“We beat teen pregnancy!” - “Oh no!”
Elaborated: “Oh no! Fewer poverty-locked consumer slaves! Who do we convince breast feeding is unhealthy and peddle formula to? How will we paint immigration as a bad thing if unemployment goes down? What if - heaven forbid - social mobility goes up?”
How do we blackmail people with no children to work shit jobs?
Someone should check that doctor’s hard-drives.
All they gonna find there is this. Nothing really interesting…
The replacement rate is down to 1.56, meaning every couple is having, on average, 1.56 children in the United States. We need two or above to keep the population at the same amount.
There’s actually another way to keep the population up, and it’s great for America economically and culturally, and it makes the world a better place at the same time.
Or maybe we give up on an economic model that requires unending population growth? Since you know, we live on a finite planet?
We have to find a path to degrowth. Stop repeating talking points that imply population growth is our only path forward.
Did you not understand that I was talking about immigration? Which is one of the ways we solve that. All of that.
Besides which we’re actually talking about keeping the population stable. A declining population is bad for everyone economically. Luckily population growth naturally slows down in modernized societies, which is why allowing people to immigrate is good for everyone.
Global population growth is happening. Slowing down, but looks inevitable for at least several more decades. Given that baseline, it is optimal for all countries involved to allow immigration from countries with population growth (reduces strain on government services, adds to the economy with remittances) to countries with lower birth rates (tax revenues support social service budgets, increased entrepreneur rate of immigrants increases job growth, etc.)
Economies can transition to population decline while maintaining standards of living for sure, if handled in a planned way. Some short-term pain during the transition, then fine later. But why go through a combination of short-term pain right now, at the same time as incredible cruelty is required to keep out migrants?
A path to degrowth will be needed globally in the medium-term future (finite planet), but trying to implement that now at just the US locally isn’t going to help the planet at all.
great for america
Oof. Not the selling point you think it is.
makes the world a better place
Theres your problem.
There’s nothing wrong with doing things that are (legitimately) great for America. I’d love to do things that are great for Russia and Israel too… but it’s unlikely that the leadership in those countries would consider them “great” actions.
Im saying they dont see it as a selling point. Im speaking of a third party’s perspective here. This is a really really basic level of abstraction imusing here, cmon.
Who are the “they” that you are referring to? MAGA? Other countries?
This is incredibly tedious. What the fuck?
If you watch the video, it’s much less strange in context (in fact, it’s not strange at all, although the guy himself is a religious crackpot). The reason he mentions “15 to 19” at all is because that’s a specific demographic in a statistic that he used, among other things, to suggest that people are having kids much later than they used to, but he doesn’t specifically talk about declining teen pregnancy like it’s a bad thing. Like seriously, watch the video; I don’t know what the fuck Mediaite is doing with this headline except for ragebait. I genuinely thought there would be even a little hint of weirdness, but no?? Somebody else please watch the clip and tell me what they think is wrong with it re: teen pregnancies.
The clip is 2:08 long; I encourage anyone who thinks this is bullshit apologia to watch it. I’m legitimately shocked that I’m having to defend something someone said on Fox News. The whole time watching it I was wondering when they were going to get to the shocking, deranged part.
(Side note: the host looks like a bootleg Rhea Seehorn.)
Edit: The Mediaite transcript of the quote below is wrong in a subtle but, I think, very important way. Please see edit in comment below.
So calling it a “problem” was just a poor choice of words?
maybe people who had living wages would be able to afford more kids… but something tells me they won’t address that. they’ll simply take away birth control and abortion.
fucking ghouls
(Edit: Please see edit first for where I just realized this disconnect between reading and viewing might be coming from.)
Yeah, I really think it is. It’s more evident if you watch the whole video (and I really think you should). I think he was implicating 15 to 19 rates as partial evidence that ages of pregnant women are climbing – but not problematic unto itself. Later in the video, he makes the claim that people are gravitating to waiting until they’re into their 30s to have kids. I.e. the “problem” isn’t that underage teens are getting pregnant less; a drop in teen pregnancies is just used as a symptom of the reasons people are waiting until late 20s, 30s, or never to have kids.
Points that he makes throughout the segment are things like advances in medical technology making late pregnancies much more viable, and that certainly isn’t targeted at teen pregnancies.
Keep in mind that I have zero respect for this guy and would have no reason to doubt he would support teen pregnancies as “god’s will” or whatever the shit: the cover of his book shown in the segment tells it all. Even through that lens, I just don’t see it as anything more than a poor choice of words that can be easily quoted without the full surrounding context. I don’t blame anyone who comes away from this thinking I’m wrong; he’s earned not having a slip-up taken charitably.
EDIT: We weren’t even talking about the same “it” here. Something I just noticed reading that again (and maybe why I didn’t think it was fucked-up watching it): that Mediaite version of the quote gets it wrong in a subtle but very important way. The real quote is: “But the problem is teens and young adults. [keeping in mind 18 and 19 are teens] From ages 15 to 19 – the fertility rate is down seven percent […]” Notice that there’s a full stop in there. That’s the way he says it. “Teens and young adults” in a healthy-ish sense of pregnancy (I don’t think pregnancies at 18 are a great idea, but you do you, queen) would, to me, refer to 18 to 25-ish. Whereas the lack of a full stop (that’s definitely present in his speech) implies “teens and young adults” means “15 to 19 exclusively”. That distinct cut-off actually changes the meaning of what he’s saying.
- In the segment: “teens and young adults” having pregnancies later is the problem. Here’s 15 to 19 to show that we’re having pregnancies later, and here are some social factors that could explain that which I’ll then use to argue is similar in young adults.
- In the subtly malformed quote: “15 to 19” having pregnancies later is the problem.
The “it” I was talking about was having them so close together. The “it” you were talking about was having 15 to 19 being a problem.
I appreciate everything you’ve done so far here- I mean no offense in saying this, but is there any chance you’d accept that maybe, you’re viewing it through a green lens?
I really tried not to. I even paused the segment when it showed his book to find out it was talking about “healing through God” – which to me grossly crosses a line for what a medical doctor should be doing. I didn’t go into the video thinking “this is bullshit”; I went into it because that’s standard practice I have for reading “person says X”-type articles like this. That’s why I was in such disbelief.
I don’t even like his rhetoric about how waiting for stability is some problem in need of solving because young people need to sacrifice their lives for
the greater goodmuh birthrate.In sum, I think this guy’s a shithead. What I don’t think is that this guy is advocating for 15-year-olds getting pregnant like the headline and the ever-convenient typo in the quote suggest.
The media spin machine works on both sides.
Capitalism needs to constantly be fed, or the entity dies (reporter, newsroom, media company, etc.).
Unfortunately, it often turns to more unethical means to accomplish its goals - even here on the Threadiverse.
Just imagine why so many people vote conservative: they listen to false reporting, and after digging in GREAT depth, find out that the left has lied. Until they learn that the right ALSO lies, they are vulnerable… and also quite justified in their claims that the other side has lied to them. It’s juvenile stuff, which somehow also predates humanity itself.
The spin-masters have harnessed this natural law and turned it to their own gain.
Mediaite posting rage bait headlines? Surely not!
