My position is that teenagers don’t have a right to sexual privacy. They have a right to personal privacy to the extent that I would, once she becomes a teenager, always knock on my daughter’s door before going in, but they don’t have a right to keep knowledge of their sexual activities secret from their parents.
Further to that though, teenagers are capable of leaving the house and if they really want to have sex, they will find a way to do it. I’d rather they had sex in my house while I pretended not to know, than go out to some party and getting it on in someone else’s bedroom.
Whether I will still think that way in 10 years time when it matters, I don’t know, probably not :dubious:.
Is anyone due sexual privacy when their children are going to be a burden to taxpayers?
There are actually people who advocate parenting licences for that reason. As for me as it’s very obvious that the idea is morally repugnant - and so is the OP’s, for similar reasons.
Not meaning to be obtuse, but I don’t quite get what “sexual privacy” means. Is it that, because OMGSex is involved, as an adult you should not interfere or talk with other concerned adults if the teen is engaging in unhealthy behavior? I find that pretty ridiculous.
However, not all sex (even among teens) is risky or inappropriate, and while on some level, yes, more people are involved in the worst-case (or should I say most-inconvenient-case) outcomes, that doesn’t mean that there is a moral duty to inform parents of the sexual activity of their children whenever one hears about it.
Well…over the years, we’ve tried child marriage, convents, chastity belts, locking them up in towers, covering them in swathes of cloth, disallowing them from speaking to males other than their fathers and brothers, killing them and their unborn babes…I’m not sure I’m okay with any of that.
With my own daughter, I plan on getting her on hormonal contraception just as soon as a physician will allow it. If she refuses, then she’s going to sit down for hours of excruciatingly embarrassing education with her mom about hormonal cycles, basal temperatures, cervical fluid, etc. and learn all the finer points of FAM. She will do some volunteer hours at a home for teen mothers, and possibly one for battered women. She will sit down and work out how much more money her mother would have made over her lifetime had her older brother not been an unplanned pregnancy, and research what sort of house in what sort of neighborhood that would have paid for.
I think she’ll probably just decide to go on the Pill.
She’s absolutely welcome to all the sex she wants, as long as it’s of the safe, sane and consensual variety. And if, despite contraception, she does get pregnant and chooses to keep it, then I will swallow my disappointment and support her and the child the best I can, just like my mom did for me. But it will be because of the failure of modern medicine or her choice, not because she was ignorant.
Eonwe, I think that’s a good point. If my friend’s child was driving drunk, or shooting heroin, or cliff diving with friends, I would tell her. Risky sex isn’t any different. Acquaintances…that’s a little harder. I’m aware that not every mother is as enlightened as I am. I would try to carefully find out more - is this family likely to become abusive to the girl if they know? Then I’d probably keep my mouth shut and my door open to her, should she need it. I’d also show her where we keep the bucket of condoms, and offer to drive her to a women’s health clinic whenever she likes.
The thing you are neglecting to think about is whether telling will actually make the situation better. Yes, the ethical action is the one that causes the least harm. But what most people talked about in that thread were issues beyond what is in the OP, issues that could make telling the parents a worse situation.
And, yes, what could the parents do? I’ve been privy to one situation where the parent could do a lot–it was when a 14 year old was having sex in the park, and my cousin (her best friend) decided to rat on her. They moved away to Iowa of all places. It only delayed the inevitable, she wound up pregnant.
And I’ve been in a situation where not telling the parents worked out: that same cousin, after the death of her mom, had a pregnancy scare with her then-boyfriend. I didn’t tell her dad (my uncle) because I knew he would overreact. I instead used my relationship with my cousin to help her over the issues with her mom’s death, and got her back to where she used to be, where she didn’t want to have sex until she was old enough to take care of a kid.
So I have one situation where telling didn’t help, and another where not telling did. This *a priori *assumption that telling the parents is a good idea is what is faulty.
I have to admit–your plan, and your back-up plan sound perfectly reasonable to me as a plan for your daughter, especially given your history. But I’m not sure I’d be any more comfortable with it as a universal approach than any of the things listed in your first paragraph, most of which don’t work all the time, and which have negative consequences for society even when they do work.
(Although I’ve read any number of sci-fi books in which hormonal implants are routine for all females, generally fixing PMS, Menstruation, and unplanned pregnancy all in one fell swoop. Although, again, not neccessarily without other consequences.)
And of course, one problem with society-wide Pilling of teens is that all the teen need do is not take the Pill a few times and POOF, no more effectiveness. And teens are (generally) stupid, and so it often becomes not so effective without intent to concieve.
Which brings us back to our conundrum–yes, there are things you (general) can do to make it less likely your daughter will behave in sexually risky behavior. But at the end of the day, you can’t guarantee anything.
The perfect solution would be to have kids surgically “fixed” at about age 5, and make the reversal procedure fairly expensive to obtain. Then they have to grow up, work deliberately, and plan to have kids of their own.
Actually, I’d be fine with the reversal procedure being free, as long as you 1) made the appointment in advance and 2) kept the appointment. Honest to god, having to go through those two steps would eliminate a significant portion of the Really Bad Idea pregnancies–the accidently-on-purpose ones, and those people that are such a mess that they can’t even handle the most basic level of administrative bullshit.
Mind you, I wouldn’t want this to be a law, but I’d dearly love for it to be a social norm. But first we have to come up with some sort of surgical procedure that is reliably reversible. I don’t think there’s anything close to that.
The problem with the pill is that it’s not without consequences. I can’t stand hormonal BC: makes me feel sluggish, kills my sex drive, and I put on weight (tremendous weight in the case of depo). I’ve never found one that really worked well. On the other hand, when pregnancy was a really, really bad idea, there were periods when I put up with the above. I don’t know what the answer is, but hormonal BC is a complicated thing. They are serious drugs, and while they are a wonderful tool to have, it’s not a universal solution.
For both sexes. A lot of men claim that women tricked them into having kids. They might be right. Requiring both sexes to be sterilized as the default would stop a lot of really bad mistakes, for both genders.
I still say she has a right to sexual privacy. The family will choose to what extent a potential pregnancy would burden them. If they choose to take on responsibility for the child, that is their choice. But it is not the only option.
ETA: Not only that, but we are assuming parental intervention would prevent a pregnancy. I am very skeptical of this, as teenagers will pretty much do whatever they want to do, even more so when someone attempts to control them.
I think that’s disingenuous. The vast majority of parents don’t have any choice once their own child is pregnant: the bonds of love and custom both pretty much demand that they sacrifice whatever they have to in order to maximize the chances of their child and grandchild being safe and secure and happy.
If what they really want to do is get pregnant, I agree with you. But if what they really want to do is fuck, then a parental intervention to provide the birth control they were too nervous, too ignorant, or too overwhelmed to obtain can be effective. I think the latter is much more common than the former.
"That’s kind of the point. As Manda JO pointed out, assuming we have a relatively normal family of non-psychopaths there is no real “choice” involved re helping their daughter take care of the baby. If the baby is coming to a teenage single mother the grandparents of the baby are effectively going to be supporting the child financially and operationally, and they are in for massive lifestyle changes.
I do disagree with the notion that a female teenager thwarted in one instance from having a baby is going to continue to run around with her vagina open until some lucky boys seed takes purchase. Teenagers are willful, but they are not planarian worms. They are also capable of taking stock and learning lessons.
Well, I think it does depend on the parents in question. When my Mom got pregnant with me she was told to be out of the house by the time I was born, and that’s exactly what happened. It was hard for her, but I don’t think what her parents did was for lack of love.
Now that I think about it, I think the “to tell or not to tell” question really is dependent on what sort of people the parents are. In some cases it would make the situation much worse, but in others it might be beneficial.
I just really don’t think parents have a right to control the sexual choices of their teenage children. They can try to influence them, but that is different than throwing down some kind of ultimatum.
I fail to see how in the vast majority of situations kicking a pregnant teen out is the best way to help her and the baby have a productive, secure life. The only exception that comes to mind is when there is someone else–a grandmother, or the baby’s father, or the baby’s father’s family–willing to step in. It’s mathmatically dubious that a teen can make enough to support a household while caring for an infant, and even more dubious that they could build towards a more secure future through education while also supporting a household and caring for an infant. Any parent of a pregnant teen is going to see this.
I thought of an analogy: if someone kidnapped your cat and sent you pictures of it being tortured, and demanded money to stop, would you feel like it was your choice? That you had other options?
Of course. And in some cases directly advising the girl herself would be appropriate.
So “If you have that baby, you can never darken this door again. You’ll get no support whatsoever from your father and I. You are 100% on your own” is fine, just exercising a choice, but “If you don’t stop having unprotected sex with that boy, you’ll have to move out: I won’t support you while you are making dangerous choices” is not?
Why does everyone focus on the teenager and not on the parents? The first thing that annoyed the piss out of me in that other thread are these parents who opted to have five children and then divorce. No one told them to be responsible, and now they are not being responsible. And now they don’t even care about one of their daughters, who is sexually active. They’re done with their kids. Check them off!
Where do you think the daughter learned her behavior?
