5 ms·

Complication from pregnancy is the leading cause of death in 15-19 year old girls, and second in 10-14, only because many of them are not yet able to conceive.

• wat10000 5mo ago
  I completely agree, but there's a decent chunk of people out there who don't.
• mothballed 5mo ago
  When I looked up causes of death in Nigeria, malaria blew away anything maternal related[]. Not that I would want to die of either. Another big one was HIV/AIDS. I guess it depends on cultural factors whether early marriage might reduce the number of partners that could introduce HIV/aids. If non-married people are less monogamous it's conceivable the increased risk of HIV/AIDS could overpower the risks of whatever additional childbirth is associated with marriage. Also note pollution was one of the bigger risks present in Nigeria. So as people get educated to go slave away in a dirty factory (or a city full of them where educated people work) it might actually be worse for their health than staying at home and marrying into some pastoral herding tribe or something. [] https://ourworldindata.org/profile/health/nigeria https://ourworldindata.org/profile/health/nigeria
  • trollbridge 5mo ago
    And more roads means more pollution. It is questionable if the answer is “make everyone dependent on cars”, although doing so obviously improves some outcomes.
• watwut 5mo ago
  Lets stop pretending there is an agreement that pain or harm to girls matters.
  • BobaFloutist 5mo ago
    Sure, but this provides an argument for postponing marriage (and educating women) at least a little even if you want to coldly maximize birthrate with no regards to their feelings.
• breezybottom 5mo ago
  It's clear to you but that's still a value judgement. It's not as clear if you discount female autonomy.
  • svnt 5mo ago
    I take your meaning but I don't agree it is only a value judgement. It is also an evolutionary and social force.
  • ascorbic 5mo ago
    The mother and baby are more likely to die. I don't think wanting to prevent that is a value judgement.
    • stinkbeetle 5mo ago
      No of course it isn't nobody suggested it was. The value judgement is saying the changes you want are worth doing because they might reduce it. Social and personal choices are weighed all the time that include risks to lives, suggesting something that might reduce risk does not end the debate. We would generally want to prevent people dying in horrible aviation disasters too, we could do that by ceasing non essential air travel.
      • fn-mote 5mo ago
        > We would generally want to prevent people dying in horrible aviation disasters too, we could do that by ceasing non essential air travel. Equating educating girls to an aviation disaster has to be a new low. This inflammatory comparison does nothing to improve the level of civil dialog on HN.
        • true_religion 5mo ago
          Argument by absurdity is a well known and to some well regarded rhetorical technique. It makes you at least agree that there is a line somewhere, and then you can go on to decide where to draw it.
• avadodin 5mo ago
  Even if true, your "leading cause of death" statement is meaningless as young women are not generally going to die from any other cause. If you "solve" teenage pregnancy, it might well become swallowing food without chewing. I bet pregnancy is not the "leading cause of death" among 80yo women. That must be the best age to start having children. Anyways, I couldn't find the reference to your statement by following the link but I found that risk of pre–eclampsia(only clearly stated risk to the mother) and lower birth weight is higher than in 20–24 —no mention of other age ranges. The report mentions that adolescent childbirth is correlated with low socio–economic status and education. Did they control for that when doing the risk assessment? It is not clear. No mention of genetic risk to the offspring. No mention of the lives of the offspring that were "terminated" in the making of the non–pregnancy statistics. Just some vague "abuse" statements that do not include figures for abuse of non–female young people. WHO, indeed.
  • true_religion 5mo ago
    I also was curious about this so I did some research. It looks like age 20 to 34 has the lowest mortality rate. Older or younger than that has higher mortality. And since 14 to 18 as a cohort are all minors, it’s completely reasonable that parents and society in general discourages this activity. Taking risks at 35 and 14 are treated differently.
    • avadodin 5mo ago
      Understandably so. But what about 18 and 33? Beyond rare risk of death to the mother, I think the health of the child to be born and the potential for younger siblings is an important consideration since we are talking about reproduction. In Europe, marriage and pregnancies below 18 were rare and people did use to average 21 before "female education" as well but other cultures differed and differ and I don't know to what extent it is appropriate to have "global" organizations mess with their reproductive lives from a Western perspective whether it has 1820s views or 2020s views.
      • true_religion 5mo ago