Not simply b/c I teach, but here you’ve got a situation where an 18-year-old is having a kid… she needs time to heal, time to be a Mom.

Any reason why she shouldn’t be able to arrange something with the school? I can’t think of one. A pro-natal perspective would definitely want to encourage this, and she’s having kids when her body is best suited for it.

One of the serious problems the western world is going through is a drop in birthrates because our current setup makes it really hard to have kids at the ages most appropriate for the job. As many people smarter than me have noted, this is a serious social problem. If we’re going to avoid demographic decline, or even the sort of demographic collapse that big chunks of Europe are seeing, we seriously need to both de-stigmatize and encourage this sort of thing.

And it ought to be a good sell to business, as well. Gals who are past the “intensive daycare” stage by the time they’re into their late 20s are a much better bet not to simply disappear out of the corporate world once they have their first kid… making them a much safer investment for their companies.