Biology trumps morals

Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune: Human beings are programmed to have sex -- to give birth to, nurture and raise the next generation of children who will continue the human species.
That's a biological reality. And yet the issue of sex remains perhaps the most taboo topic in a majority of human cultures. If it is an essential act necessary to preserve the human species, why is that? The taboo can't be totally healthy.
An example came up this week when Dr. Laurence Shaw, described as one of Britain's most prominent fertility experts, told a scientific gathering in Prague that teenage girls who get pregnant don't deserve condemnation or scorn because "this is a natural response by these girls to their rising fertility levels."
Times change
Squeezing what Shaw meant into a few sentences yields this: Until about 150 years ago, most women could hope to live only into their 50s, at best. Over time, they evolved to reach peak fertility in the late teens and early 20s. That left them two or three decades to raise their children, during which their fertility fell off rapidly. This, many speculate, was a positive thing, in that it cleared the way for older women to help their own daughters raise their children.
Rapid advances in health care, diet and other factors associated with modernity have, Shaw says, created an imbalance: Biology still dictates maximum fertility in the teens and early 20s , but the period deemed the "right" time for pregnancy has moved much later. So you have a conflict between biological imperatives and social requirements.
Shaw's comments caused the uproar you'd expect in conservative political and religious circles. But he makes a powerful point: It's still tragically unwise for most teens to have babies, particularly in the industrial world. In developing strategies to discourage that, however, it's far more helpful to view those pregnancies not in moral terms, but in their proper biological and evolutionary context.