Why the "but life expectancy was so much shorter back then" argument doesn't hold water?

This is a very common, and a very stupid argument.

"they only did that because they had to" seems fine, except that Jacqui hasn't begun to examine whether they wanted to or not.

Why the assumption that the practice was undesirable?

150 years ago people were very unhealthy. Their growth and puberty were delayed. Jacqui's example is bad.

Hunter-gatherers, however, do tend to settle down and have kids shortly after puberty, so around 14 years of age.

Do 14-year-old hunter-gatherers have to do that?

I suspect that most of them want to.

Like what else are they going to do with their time? Travel? See London? They got no airplanes.

Start a career? Maybe advertising.

Their whole culture is designed for raising babies. They've been helping with babies their whole lives.

Their tribes have structures in place to support young mothers to the utmost.

This is our natural state. We lived like this for a million years.

Of course we don't do that now.

But ffs stop pretending that that's not the most natural thing we could do.

Our society has established schools and places of employment which effectively exclude new mothers.

That's why having babies as a young woman is such a bad idea.

Because of the system we created.

That's why we have to fight against nature. Biology is not on our side.

With good sex education, contraceptive access, and free health care plenty of advanced societies do really well at handling happy young adult sex lives without having ten million pregnant teenagers.

Guess which country is really bad at sex education, contraceptive access, and free health care.

#SPR860