If we lived on a planet where every person was a rational, level-headed adult, lectures and books would be enough of an education. Sadly, most of the people are irrational and emotional; if you want to steer them towards better life decisions, for their sake as well as society's, shame is a very good tool.
America has a long, ugly history of shaming single mothers, sexual abuse victims, adulterers and interracial and non-heterosexual relationships. I don't think that we should encourage more of it.
> Sadly, most of the people are irrational and emotional; if you want to steer them towards better life decisions, for their sake as well as society's, shame is a very good tool.
Would you use the word 'paternalistic' to describe your views on an ideal society?
This is not true at all. Everyone knows how not to have children, just like everyone knows smoking can cause cancer. People just take the risk anyway. It's basic human irrationality, no amount of education can fix it.
Societal pressure, on the other hand, does have some of the desired effect, even if it's not a "nice thing" like education.
I used to help moderate a LiveJournal community called "amipregnant" and this is a laughably false assertion.
"Yes, you can get pregnant your first time having sex" and "no, you can't get pregnant from sitting on a toilet seat a boy used" were both pretty common sorts of things we had to tell folks.
Otherwise, I think it's self-evident. There's many behaviors that would've been socially unacceptable a hundred years ago, which today are accepted and far more common. For a somewhat related example, consider inter-racial or (to some degree) inter-religious marriages.
There is, in fact, a massive confluence of reasons why poor people end up having children, and shaming them for doing so instead of helping those reasons will not help anyone.