Mark Anthony Falzon (The Sunday Times, March 25) disagreed with what Angela Abela said about teenage mothers, namely that “it is unfair on the baby” if the offspring happens to have a teenage parent.
I think they are both right. I am not going to defend either of them, as they do not need my defence, but I will defend certain biological facts.
Teenage pregnancy is a cost of early sexual behaviour in modern society. In the industrial world, the United States has the highest rate of teenage births and Japan has the lowest, closely followed by Switzerland and the Netherlands.
Although teenage pregnancy is usually costly in the modern environment, in our evolutionary past it was sometimes to a young girl’s, and hence also to her parents’, advantage. Nonetheless there will always have been costs attached to early pregnancies, for both the girl and her baby.
Even now, such mothers face higher risks of complications in childbirth, and their infants are at greater risk of prematurity, low birth weight, death in the first year of life and developmental problems.
Teenage mothers may also end up with fewer children when their family is completed. Occasionally, however, such potential disadvantages may be offset by compensations, such as the shortening of the generation interval or being impregnated by a particularly desirable man.
It was to allow for these costs and benefits that natural selection designed fertility stages in a woman’s life. In the years immediately following puberty, a few cycles are fertile but the majority are not. Even in the most permissive societies, girls have seldom conceived in the years after puberty, even when having intercourse frequently.
So a young girl could sometimes take advantage of her earliest reproductive opportunities while most of the time remaining protected from pregnancies that her body judged to be unwise.
Essentially, if she conceived it would be because her body judged conception to be advantageous. I think many readers will raise an eyebrow when reading this but this is how nature works.
In the modern world, however, there are other factors, such as education, social prospects and wealth, the influence on a girl’s long-term reproductive prospects and that she may suffer if she embarks on motherhood at too early an age.
The protection and opportunism that natural selection afforded girls in the ancestral environment is imperfect today, so that very often those pregnancies that a teenage girl’s body does allow may actually reduce, rather than enhance, her long-term reproductive success.
Parents do their best to restrain and protect their teenage daughters. They are working, though, against a young female body that natural selection has predisposed to sometimes allow or even seek conception.
Such considerations are irrelevant to the average parent in modern Western society. Disease, particularly sexually-transmitted disease, and teenage pregnancies appear to be on the increase because they are more and more in the media spotlight. Whether they are really proliferating is a matter for interesting debate.
In Malta the wave seems to have hit us lately and teenage pregnancies are on the increase. Natural selection has programmed parents to respond to any apparent increase in risk by restraining even more rigorously their children’s urge for sexual exploration. In the 1990s, this is what seems to have happened throughout Western societies.
Parents have been programmed to weigh up the costs and benefits of their children’s sexual behaviour and restrain or give rein to their children accordingly. No matter what legal strictures, religious constraints, different individuals in any society will perceive the risks and benefits of their children’s sexual exploration differently.