Fox News Senior Medical Analyst Marc Siegel made some eyebrow-raising comments lamenting that birth rates are down among teenagers aged 15 to 19.
On Thursday, the National Center for Health Statistics reported that the U.S. fertility rate fell to another record low. The agency reported that the number of births per 1,000 women of childbearing age declined from 53.8 in 2024 to 53.1 last year. The latest figure represents a continuation of a decades-long decline in fertility rates.
Siegel joined Friday’s edition of America’s Newsroom, where Dana Perino said that while the continuing trend is not surprising, “the numbers might feel a little shocking.”
Yeah, I really think it is. It’s more evident if you watch the whole video (and I really think you should). I think he was implicating 15 to 19 rates as partial evidence that ages of pregnant women are climbing – but not problematic unto itself. Later in the video, he makes the claim that people are gravitating to waiting until they’re into their 30s to have kids. I.e. the “problem” isn’t specifically that teens are getting pregnant less; a drop in teen pregnancies is just used as a symptom of the reasons people are waiting until late 20s, 30s, or never to have kids.
Points that he makes throughout the segment are things like advances in medical technology making late pregnancies much more viable, and that certainly isn’t targeted at teen pregnancies.
Keep in mind that I have zero respect for this guy and would have no reason to doubt he would support teen pregnancies as “god’s will” or whatever the shit: the cover of his book shown in the segment tells it all. Even through that lens, I just don’t see it as anything more than a poor choice of words that can be easily quoted without the full surrounding context. I don’t blame anyone who comes away from this thinking I’m wrong; he’s earned not having a slip-up taken charitably.
I appreciate everything you’ve done so far here- I mean no offense in saying this, but is there any chance you’d accept that maybe, you’re viewing it through a green lens?
I really tried not to. I even paused the segment when it showed his book to find out it was talking about “healing through God” – which to me grossly crosses a line for what a medical doctor should be doing. I didn’t go into the video thinking “this is bullshit”; I went into it because that’s standard practice I have for reading “person says X”-type articles like this. That’s why I was in such disbelief.
I don’t even like his rhetoric about how waiting for stability is some problem in need of solving because young people need to sacrifice their lives for
the greater goodmuh birthrate.In sum, I think this guy’s a shithead. What I don’t think is that this guy is advocating for 15-year-olds getting pregnant like the headline and the ever-convenient typo in the quote suggest.