The Mis-Match Between God's Word and God's World

 So, here's a conundrum: 

• A woman can get pregnant around age 12 (puberty)
• But pregnancy at age 12 is dangerous, as the rest of her body has not necessarily matured enough to make for a relatively problem-free pregnancy. "Adolescent mothers (aged 10–19 years) face higher risks of eclampsia, puerperal endometritis and systemic infections than women aged 20–24 years, and babies of adolescent mothers face higher risks of low birth weight, preterm birth and severe neonatal condition."
• Meanwhile, the brain does not finish maturing until roughly age 25.
• So, our gametes are operational about age 12, pregnancy is optimal between 20-24, and our brains don't finish maturing until age 25

The times don't mesh. For a fertility plan created by God, the obvious question is "why not?"  Remember, for most of human history (up until the 20th century, in fact), it has been legal in every recorded human culture, throughout the world and the centuries, to marry and begin having children by age 10 or 12. Yes, that was true even in the United States, right up through 1885. 

Now, we know that brain plasticity is important to early childhood development. In fact, language learning is much easier in children precisely because their brains are nowhere close to maturation. For most of human history, until the last century, human beings have been married and started having children while still in their teens (or even pre-teens), it is certainly possible that the brain plasticity of the teen years is uniquely adapted to forming those same teens to learn to be parents. 

If this is true, teen pregnancy, far from being a bane to civilization, is the main source for family formation. By having and raising children before age 25, that is, before decreasing brain plasticity closes off ease of learning, men and woman are "formed" by the child-bearing experience into a parental view of the world. Failure to have children prior to the age of 25 means the parents' brains will be much less plastic, much less able to accommodate the new child-care experience. That is, the parents will be much less amenable to being formed into a parental worldview.

We already know that exposure to the "scent of a woman" increases testosterone levels in men. It is quite possible that male sperm counts are dropping, in part, because so many women are on hormonal birth control. But another part of the problem, the learning capacity of the teenage and adult brain, has not been much discussed. Perhaps it is time to start the discussion.