“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” (Ariel Durant)
There has been quite the uproar over Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old daughter who is pregnant and plans to marry the father. Many have decried this potential marriage as a terrible idea because the couple is “too young.” But it wasn’t long ago that such a marriage would not have been thought of as unusual.
"The traditional markers of manhood--leaving home, getting an education, starting a family and starting work--have moved downfield as the passage from adolescence to adulthood has evolved," says Michael Kimmel, author of
Guyland. For instance, in 1960, almost 70 percent of men had reached these milestones by the age of 30; today, less than a third of males can say the same.
Some of the most successful marriages in the world started with two teenagers. Indeed, it is difficult to reach 75 years of marriage if one waits until he is 30 to say “I do”; you’re pretty much dead by then.
Even biology challenges us to rethink delayed marriage. According to U.S. researchers, who analyzed census data and information from genealogical records, children born when their mothers were under 25 were almost twice as likely to live to their 100th birthday and beyond, and University of Chicago husband and wife team Dr. Leonid Gavrilov and Dr. Natalia Gavrilova have shown firstborn children live longer than their younger siblings. It appears the two are linked, with older children living longer because their mothers are younger when they have them.
Studies also have shown it takes longer for older men to conceive. Starting in their 20s, men face steadily increasing chances of infertility, fathering an unsuccessful pregnancy, and passing on to their children a genetic mutation that causes dwarfism. “We (now) know the probability for certain types of DNA damage goes up with age, and we can give you a mathematical probability,” says Andrew Wyrobek, a researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California.
Not only is it bad for our children’s health to delay marriage and childbirth, but this dela also is resulting in increasingly lower birth rates, which may be bad for the longevity of Western culture. According to Mark Steyn, the low birth rates already at play in Europe are a prescription for the end of Western civilization:
“Seventeen European nations are now at what demographers call ‘lowest-low’ fertility--1.3 births per woman, the point at which you’re so far down the death spiral you can’t pull out. In theory, those countries will find their population halving every 35 years or so. In practice, it will be quicker than that, as the savvier youngsters figure there’s no point sticking around a country that’s turned into an undertaker’s waiting room. So large parts of the western world are literally dying--and, in Europe, the successor population to those aging French, Dutch and Belgians is already in place.”