child birth
 

it always seemed weird to me how easy it is for a women to get pregnant considering that humans take care of children for 18 years and its such a drastically life changing event. according to freakonomics, the legalization of abortion resulted in huge decreases in crime. If God exists, or there was an intelligent design, wouldnt it make sense to postpone a women's fertility until she was older, more mature and to make it harder for people to get pregnant and give them more control in the matter?

Instead reality shows us that our selfish genes at work. the most enjoyable experience in life is sex. the older i get, the more i think about things around me, the way i think and act, and the nature of our world...the colder and more random it seems.

Re: child birth
 

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If God exists, or there was an intelligent design, wouldnt it make sense to postpone a women's fertility until she was older, more mature and to make it harder for people to get pregnant and give them more control in the matter?


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You do realize that God intentionally made it so women would suffer. The pain of childbirth was punishment for eating the apple:

Genesis 3:16 (King James Version)
King James Version (KJV)
Public Domain



16Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

Re: child birth
 

You don't and can't know God's thought process. (this is true whether he exists or not)

It's definitely frustrating if you want to make arguments from evil, or the slew of who goes to heaven/hell arguments Sklanky makes against certain Gods. God could think roasting infants alive is good, and he would be right even though we think it is terrible. Theists can wave their hands and say God has his reasons which are apparently beyond us. This would be a fair and reasonable thing to do if there really was such a being.

Re: child birth
 

is it really that easy to get a chick pregnant? don't you have to be inside a window of a few days, and even then it's a crapshoot?

Re: child birth
 

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it always seemed weird to me how easy it is for a women to get pregnant considering that humans take care of children for 18 years and its such a drastically life changing event. according to freakonomics, the legalization of abortion resulted in huge decreases in crime. If God exists, or there was an intelligent design, wouldnt it make sense to postpone a women's fertility until she was older, more mature and to make it harder for people to get pregnant and give them more control in the matter?

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we evolved in a tougher environment, shorter life expectancy. Now we're stuck with it for a while. This is another example of reason overcoming instinct. It's common for women in wealthier countries to do just as you're expecting. we outfox 'selfish genes' all the time.

luckyme

Re: child birth
 

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If God exists, or there was an intelligent design, wouldnt it make sense to postpone a women's fertility until she was older...

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Yes, if only he had provided some means for us to do just that as we evolve. Oh wait...

http://www.aquavpc.com/blog/images/S...traception.jpg

Re: child birth
 

Alternatively.... one could point to the lower-than-replacement birth rates in most of the developed world... and comment on how evolution has to 'trick' women into getting pregnant easily - since, when they are given the choice, too few of them choose to let it happen.

I think if you polled the average fundamentalist, he'd say he believed that having babies early and often was the divine plan for women and we shouldn't be tampering with it.

I don't hold with the fundamentalists... but I DO think the evidence is overwhelming against OP's position - that if there is a God or an intelligent design, he would make sure that conception was easy and moderately unexpected, specifically to prevent selfish sentient creatures from avoiding it. (Alternatively, he could have built in a big enough carrot/stick -- say, "if you have a child before age 25, you will live to be 75, but otherwise you will die at 25" to cause the selfish sentient to want babies.)

Re: child birth
 

Doesn't the substantially lower life expectancies of the past easily explain why women can be fertile at a young age?

Re: child birth
 

it shouldnt seem weird how easily women get pregnant. if women were less fertile, we wouldn't be here. Or, more likely, some woman would be born with a mutation that makes for increased fertility. And her descendants would populate the earth. and so here we are. its one of those anthropic principle thingys.

Re: child birth
 

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Doesn't the substantially lower life expectancies of the past easily explain why women can be fertile at a young age?

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Bingo.

If women got pregnant later, we wouldn't exist in the first place. Since delayed marriage and childbirth have taken root (something that didn't occur until the mid-to-latter 20th century) we have birth control.

Strangely enough, the educated portions of society are not keeping up with the replacement rate.

Re: child birth
 

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it always seemed weird to me how easy it is for a women to get pregnant considering that humans take care of children for 18 years and its such a drastically life changing event.

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Taking care of a child till their 18 is a modern concept. The reality is at some point the children give more than they take from the clan. The number of years a child is a liability to the clan is usually measured in single digits. The number of years a child/person is an asset to the clan usually requires double digits to measure. A child doesn't have to be very old at all to earn its keep.

When you think about these problems think about them in the context of a human family that lived 10,000 years ago. Looking at it from a modern paradigm will only screw you up.

Stu

Re: child birth
 

But if we accept this, then we have to recognize that humans are "ready" for sex at a very young age. There might be psychological consequences, but these are probably a result of cultural influences (as it wouldn't make sense for early sex to be the biological tendency if there were any kind of long-term negative consequences - natural selection is rarely that sloppy, usually only when there's no alternative).

This implies that the "you can damn well have sex when you're 18" folks are fundamentally in error (to say nothing of the "you can damn well have sex when you're married" folks).

Re: child birth
 

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But if we accept this, then we have to recognize that humans are "ready" for sex at a very young age. There might be psychological consequences, but these are probably a result of cultural influences (as it wouldn't make sense for early sex to be the biological tendency if there were any kind of long-term negative consequences - natural selection is rarely that sloppy, usually only when there's no alternative).

This implies that the "you can damn well have sex when you're 18" folks are fundamentally in error (to say nothing of the "you can damn well have sex when you're married" folks).

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This is very true. Our culture (and most other cultures right now) treats young people like children for much longer than at any other time in history. Delaying adulthood to age 18 is a very new phenomenon. People forget this, and that's why we're so horrified to see children working from sunrise to sunset in Africa to survive. It shouldn't be as big of a shock as it is to us.