(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.

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

The problem is the encouragement in general

I don’t see why that’s a problem. I think it could come in the form of actual benefits, not a just verbal haranguing / extolling based on (not) having children, but that it’s good for the birth rate to be slightly above replacement and correcting any divergence should be encouraged.

Yeah, I’m not worried about running out of humans globally, and I do think immigration is a fine way for a country to choose to maintain their population.

There’s probably something to be said around cultural preservation, and maybe that’s a bit easier for “native born” persons. But, I don’t know the steelman version of that argument, if there is one.