There is also a lot of evidence that shows the availability of factory jobs in developing countries (not just Africa but also India and Pakistan) is very good for young women. A young woman who gets a job outside of her poor family is much less likely to be forced to marry young.
it also stops them from having children when they get older too
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Here is some evidence: https://womensenews.org/2002/07/bangladesh-garment-workers-h...
“Ever since I started working in the garment factory, my life has changed. For the first time, I am not being looked upon as a burden. It has improved my status within the family,” said 19-year-old Chobi Mahmud, a garment worker in Dhaka.
That's an anecdote.
Here is a lot more.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-only-thing-worse-than-swea...
That's putting the cart before the horse. Notice how it only goes back to the 80's, way after the current usurious inflation driven economic system has been forced on the world.
Sounds like you are rejecting evidence you dont want to confront
I genuinely appreciated your evidence and take it to heart, thank you.
We're talking about children.
Childhood pregnancy is the leading cause of death in teenage girls.
We can say the factory is better.
Bullshit. In nigeria it's infectious disease[].
Oh yes, and that includes HIV/AIDS, you know, what you are way more likely to get if you're in non-monogamous relationships (which perhaps is more likely for those that aren't married).
And the #1 in general non-communicable risk factor reported here is, surprise, "air pollution." You know, that comes from factories and heavy industry.
[]https://ourworldindata.org/profile/health/nigeria
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>The data don't support your perspective.
No, "my source" (yours is: nothing cited, so pretty hilarious rebuttal) shows 43% of deaths (not under 5, generally deaths) in 2023 from infectious disease and 1.8% from maternal disease.
Lets see your sources on how that 1.8% rises above the 43% even when narrowed to "teenage girls." I saw elsewhere you posted some vague not even nigerian focused data that also included "unsafe abortions" to get to your claim (what does this even mean? Include things like taking a bunch of drugs and hoping it's only strong enough to kill the fetus?)
You're literally proclaiming the data "don't support your perspective" when I'm refuting your uncited perspective with at least something, which is absolutely hilarious position for you to be proselytizing about data from.
>Your source is focused on children under five. If you data source includes children under 10, none of them will be capable of becoming pregnant. If it includes boys, none of them will be capable of becoming pregnant.
Lol so you didn't even look through it all the way. Because children under 5 was only one part of it. It showed general statistics as well. Unfortunately for your claim your provide .... nothing ... while damning those questioning your "trust me bro." You don't get to set an even lower standard of evidence for yourself than you demand of others.
I am replying a second time to try to make things coherent with all the edits you are doing.
Your data source does not seem to break out teenagers over 15. It does focus on children under five. It has some data just on children, which seems to be under 15 in this dataset but I am not sure and don’t have time to continue to dig in on this. Your dataset is unable to answer the question you are posing as presented.
The vast majority of deaths in countries like Nigeria are young children, old people, and men. Girls and women aged in their teens, which you did not seem to find any specific data for, generally have relatively low mortality. The leading cause of death globally, centered in less developed nations, in this population, is complications from pregnancy. This was until recently generally put down to improvements in western medicine and childbirth being dangerous. Since about 2020 people have started to realize child marriage is the issue.
The reason for this is mechanical: their pelves are underdeveloped and not ready to birth a baby with a big head.
Unsafe abortions is exactly what it sounds like, and a health risk specific to pregnancy. It can be in order to prevent death in childbirth, whether done early and quietly, or during childbirth in more tragic cases.
Show us how you get to the 1.8% overcoming the 43% for the "childhood pregnancy" in "teenage girls." I believe that will include, generously deaths that occured from 13y to ~18y9m if you want to be assured of any pregnancy that occurred at some point that met the condition of both "childhood" and "teenage." Show the specific data. And don't bullshit it with 19 year olds, that is not "childhood pregnancy" (your words) or by excluding 13 or 14 year olds (you said "teenage girls").
I also want to know exactly what it means by "unsafe abortions" whether this includes things like "decided to kill the fetus, and myself" which technically is still an unsafe abortion but more like suicide.
So far you haven't shown the data at all, you did a bunch of handwaving angry at other data which more than clears your standard of evidence of nothing while setting a much looser standard of trust-me-bro for yourself or the non-datapoint of what a vague uncited blurb I had to hunt down elsewhere in your comment links to about 15-19 year olds which is 2/5ths adults. You're holding me to a high (higher) standard of evidence. Remember, we're talking about a claim you originally made for which you have the burden of proof, so don't try to bullshit me by holding yourself to a different standard of evidence than me. I'm not going to continue play the fuck-fuck game where I have to get the data concerning your own argument for you (as I did) and you lazily declare it's not good enough.
I didn’t provide it because it is trivially easy to find:
https://www.who.int/health-topics/adolescent-health/pregnanc...
Your perfect dataset probably doesn’t exist. There may be specific countries where something else overshadows it (suicide, a specific disease) due to other conditions or lack of medical care. But we are interested in the effect of education on girls and child marriage and pregnancy, which is not an issue specific to Nigeria anyway.
The only thing I even saw there was a non data conclusion of the following:
18 and 19 year old are adults, and the lions shares of 18 to 19 is periods during which it would be physically impossible to be linked to "childhood pregnancy." 13 and 14 year old "teenage girls" are also excluded from that range.Is there data here or just a conclusory statement that also is conditioned on adding in some undefined idea of what a unsafe abortion is? The fact it's imperfect is one thing, but not only is the range only a little better than half-correct but I also can't figure out what data source the conclusion comes from.
Right so this is where you can write to the WHO I guess and demand answers, or go search on google scholar and find out.
It's trivially easy to find, but now I have to write the WHO about why their vague statement applies to your entirely different assertion. But we mustn't trust the data showing a general 20x rate of death by infectious disease because it would be presumptuous of us to think that would apply to teenagers well enough that it can overcome maternal mortality.
Truly mind boggling.
That was a joke, because the idea that your conclusion spitballed by an amateur in an hour is more valid than one published by the WHO is a joke.
The WHO didnt even make your claim. Yours is based on nothing, not even a spitball (or even an appeal to authority of the WHO since thats not what they said), which i did because you cited absolutely nothing when you asserted it. And now you want me to bear an entirely different standard of evidence than what you set. Dont dish out what you can't take -- your entire argument is a bald faced fabrication.
Your source is focused on children under five. If you data source includes children under 10, none of them will be capable of becoming pregnant. If it includes boys, none of them will be capable of becoming pregnant.
The data don't support your perspective.
The evidence is plentiful and obvious. Numerous such factories operate in free countries where people have a choice about what they do for a living. The locals willingly choose the factory work in large numbers. A young woman who thinks she would be better off marrying young instead of working in a factory is generally free to do so.
I'm also glad they have the option - and it does seem that many will take up that option. They themselves have judged that factory work is less bad than 'house' work, might be worth listening to them.
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I can tell you're upset, but it's hard to understand what you're arguing for with those last two points.
> 1. Let's not pretend that young people... don't make their own terrible decisions too. Look at the divorce rate and the rates of reported DV in the West.
Do you believe that there will be happier marriages and less domestic violence when brides are 16 years old and have little to no agency in choosing who marries them? It seems like your argument should be that people should be more careful in choosing who they marry, not less.
> 2. The Western way ("love marriage" + "women must work or the family will be in poverty") has led to most Western countries being on a downward spiral to literal extinction...
This is just literal ignorance on your part. In every country in the world, higher quality of life (wealth, education, longevity, etc.) has lead to a decrease in population. This is not correlated to "love marriage" or "women must work or the family will be in poverty" -- indeed, women in less developed countries work more hours than their peers in developed countries, though often in the informal sector.
I get that European- and US-based writers often assume their own culture's ideas are best. But your arguments are doing nothing to refute the article. Rather than adding to the discourse, you just seem like you're standing on a soapbox against women having agency.
> Do you believe that there will be happier marriages and less domestic violence when brides are 16 years old and have little to no agency in choosing who marries them?
Comparison isn't necessarily binary. I'd posit these things are more likely determined by other socio-cultural variables, the individuals involved (which is partially contextualized by said variables) and a noisy baseline than whether or not a marriage is arranged. In otherwords, an independent variable (which means I disagree with the both of you)
> In every country in the world, higher quality of life (wealth, education, longevity, etc.) has lead to a decrease in population.
I'm not sure that holds. Do you mean that a higher quality of life leads to a decrease in fertility rate? It's obviously true that population booms eventually end, and historically large ones are usually followed by contraction as a correction. But overall those things you list result in an increase of population, it simply hits a ceiling and stabilizes. We just had the largest population boom in observable (more than recorded!) history, the industrial revolution dwarfs the agricultural one. It stands to reason we should see a pretty hefty population contraction which tapers into a very mild amount of growth until we raise the population ceiling once again.
I don't think he's particularly right that low fertility rates are caused by "marriage for love". It's more like many places with low fertility rates are currently correcting for overly explosive growth experienced in recent history. Other places are only just now having their local population booms, or correcting for other population effects (like war.) It's very unlikely we will contract more than a few billion over the next couple hundred years. Keep in mind the industrial revolution is what caused us to rocket into the billions in the first place. For reference the upper bound estimated population of the 10th century is 400 million, and the upper bound of the 17th is about 500 million. 25% global growth over 700 years. The last 300 years is something like 1700%.
Almost all rhetoric about birth rates never accounts for any of this. So again, independent variables.
> many places with low fertility rates are currently correcting for overly explosive growth experienced in recent history
Huh? Korea is "correcting" for past growth by having 0.8 children per woman? i.e. less than half the replacement rate? Such a wild swing in fertility, when it swings below replacement, solves zero problems while creating existential ones, so I don't see how anyone can call it a 'correction' as though it is helping to 'balance out' something.
The West is literally killing itself off with this, not because it's necessarily so bad that we might simply have fewer people in a given country in 50 years, that certainly sounds fine if it the remaining population were still in a healthy ratio of young to old. But that's not how it works. Populations age of course, and fertility rates crashing the way they have means the 45-year-olds who are so plentiful today but had 0-1 kids will be 70 in 25 years and there will be almost no working people to pay for their expensive healthcare and living expenses.
And yes, the low fertility rates are caused by our 2-income-standard economic system + unaffordability (countries are doing nothing to support people at a healthy childbearing age to start families).
While women in other cultures, or women of 1950 may have felt they had no choice to have a career, women in the West today don't feel they even have a choice to even have kids, at 22, which physiologically is a great age to do it, or sometimes ever. Why? Because, for instance in the US, at 22 you likely have high 5-figures of student loan debt and shaky job prospects, zero guarantee of paid family leave (maybe a temporary pittance is provided in some states in some circumstances), and a one-income family is not able to compete for scarce expensive housing.
I'm not saying this is black and white, rather I'm saying that our enlightened Western system (A) has downsides too, (B) robs people of choice in another way, and (C) is so unsustainable that no matter what you think, our societies inevitably will fail - in large part because of this issue.
Here's a far better explained version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-gYFcVx-8Y
Don't be obtuse. You can quit a boss and never see them again.
As a child factory slave?
No one seriously wants to compare the relative merits of child factory slavery and traditional child bride type situations. Like literally no one here is saying "its better to enslave children in factories compared to having them exchange their womb for protection from a local man."
Being forced to do anything is bad. Having an evaluation of your options is good. I don't think a facial argument can be made you're better off in the factory, although it might be true. I can think of many scenarios where I'd rather be in the factory, but also many where perhaps I'd prefer to have some selection of pastoral herding families to marry into over being funneled into "the one factory" where the god-billionaire has even more power than a vindictive husband.
I'm certainly not going to look at a piece of paper that says "factory move into town and women (or chidlren) took the jobs" and then just declare the women are better off. What happened before that factory was there? Did they buy off the agricultural or herding land and turn it into a waste dump? Are the power dynamics against women even worse now, where before it was a decentralized network of husbands but now one centralized hierarchal company with bosses that are even more above the law than the husband was? I don't know.
Here is some evidence: https://womensenews.org/2002/07/bangladesh-garment-workers-h... “Ever since I started working in the garment factory, my life has changed. For the first time, I am not being looked upon as a burden. It has improved my status within the family,” said 19-year-old Chobi Mahmud, a garment worker in Dhaka.
I'd be interested to know what happened when this transition took place in Europe and the UK, because we'd have the advantage of hundreds of years of history to inform the outcomes. It's easy to forget that our great grandparents and grandparents experienced roughly the same dichotomy between living on a farm raising kids and going to work for a capitalist owner of a factory for a meager wage. The romanticization of that period paints a picture of choice that I don't really buy. It seems like your desire to find nuance is validated by what I do already know.
This is appalling. Delete it.
is this saying like "we were happier with some nuts and occasional games, discovering fire was a mistake"
Africa is a continent
Yeah but more independence means it will eventually lead to the breakdown of family structures because if the US is anything to go by where 75% of divorces are women initiated you’re going to end up with broken families all over, dads in jail due to the inability to pay child support, parent less kids. In South Asia there is a tremendous amount of good that comes from having stable families even if everyone in it is not a 100% satisfied with their life.
That being said, I’m not against any of this progress but you can’t just introduce these sweeping societal changes to millenia old traditions and expect the social order in the country to survive.
What you are hiding in the "not 100% satisfied" are higher levels of domestic violence and abuse. Living in such situation massively sux and is impossible to escape.
There is also tremendous bad and horror in all that. Some peoples lives completely sux due to that.
It’s not hiding. Yes there may be domestic abuse but at the same time it’s not like the man is just cruising through life either. He is essentially having to work very hard for many many hours a week to provide for his family. So no one is really 100% happy but I would posit that the overall level of life satisfaction is much higher than whatever we have currently created in the United States (obviously this assumes that there is enough money for the basics and necessities of life and a middle class salary). You see these numbers bear out in India in happiness indexes if you specifically exclude people that are not in the upper or middle classes.
Tell mw more about how Afghanistan men are oppressed compared to women.
Or how child bride subject to lifelong violence and dependency has it as bad her husband, because he needs to work.
Afghanistan is an extreme case. For something less extreme I think the Middle East as a whole works well.