My dog was a breeder. She was not interested in sex until she came into season. Humans are not designed that way. Sex for us is natural for reproduction and for feeling good. Perhaps we evolved that way for pair bonding. Nonetheless, pretending that kids are not going to do it is crazy, no matter what we teach.
Locks and alarms together are even better. Given STDs, the pill and a condom might be the way to go.
In other words, punish them for not listening to you, in a very severe way. Have you done this by any chance, or is it just theoretical to you? A parent telling a pregnant kid “see, I told you. It’s your fault!” shouldn’t expect a close relationship in the future.
Discourage them from doing anything when they were too young, yeah, that worked. Discouraging them from being promiscuous, that worked too. But we didn’t even try to discourage them from sex before marriage. That is unrealistic and hypocritical. In fact they both knew that we thought that getting married before having sex is just dumb. One of them is married and the other will probably be married within the year. So I speak from experience.
The only mistake here is not using birth control.
I’ve been married over 30 years and I guess I still don’t have enough respect for sex. We’re past reproductive age, and it is still fun. It is sad to think otherwise.
And I assume we’re still talking about younger people - because I’m not concerned about twenty somethings who are on birth control, because the guy likes to ejaculate inside rather than pulling out.
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No, it is preventing a disruptive pregnancy. Even more important for those opposed to abortion. And I care more about my kids sleeping well than me. (We’ve never even had a scare, btw.)
Yeah, I’m also a little hard-pressed to picture a consenting sexual contact between teenagers as demonstrating their immorality. Just educate them on the mechanics and consequences and make the remedies available to them. I don’t understand what the big deal is. I mean, teenagers having sex… so?
How absurd is it that we’re programmed to want to have sex when we hit puberty, and yet for some reason you think that it should be repressed due to ‘morals’ you personally hold.
On the bright side, every time I see the statistic that kids who were exposed to exclusively abstinence-only education are more likely to engage in oral or anal sex, I think ‘Yay for abstinence-only education!’.
This is another great example of conservative ideology trumping reality. Countries with comprehensive sex education have lower rates of pregnancy, and children begin to be sexually active later than they do in the US. If you look at teenage pregnancy rates they are higher in the conservative red states.
It’s time to get your head out of Atlas Shrugged and The Bible and look at the real world before you drive the country off a cliff again.
“The United States’ teen pregnancy rate is almost three times that of Germany and France, and over four times that of the Netherlands”
“In the United States, the teen abortion rate is twice that of Germany and more than 1.5 times that of the Netherlands.”
But how do they achieve these desired outcomes? “Youth have convenient access to free or low-cost contraception through national health insurance. Sex education is not necessarily a separate curriculum and is usually integrated across school subjects and at all grade levels. Educators provide accurate and complete information in response to students’ questions.”
It’s about that, about lying to the kids so they grow up not knowing how reproduction works, and about teaching them to hate themselves for wanting sex, and hating the people they find attractive for “tempting” them. They also tend to end up as adults who are ignorant about reproduction; adults who hate themselves, and hate or fear whichever gender they find attractive.
Exactly. Most animals want sex only during a specific period of fertility, and are very fertile during that period; IIRC, cattle have an 85% chance of conception per sex act. Humans want sex all year round, aren’t naturally even aware of their own fertile periods, and have a much lower fertility rate even when they are consciously timing things to convenience. We are quite clearly evolved to have sex far more often than necessary for reproduction. Humans aren’t cows or dogs, we’re human.
You make it sound like women choose birth control like choosing between different brands of cereal at the store. For one, women on this very message board have posted time and again about how difficult it is to find a Dr. willing to give a woman of childbearing age who hasn’t had children an IUD. So for some women, they aren’t even given a choice of IUD. Second, IUD is expensive. If it’s not covered by insurance most women, regardless of income level, are going to choose something that is, even if it’s less effective. I also believe that there is a general lack of knowledge about IUD so many women may not even know it’s an option.
Plus doctors old enough might have a bias against IUDs because of the Dalkon Shield problem. I’m sensitive heh to this because after we had our second child my wife basically could not get an IUD in the US, despite it being very effective for her. We were about to go to Copenhagen for one, but I decided to get a vasectomy instead and we went to the much warmer Caribbean. Though IUDs are much safer now, their rep may not have recovered.
This again? I swear this pops up every couple of months. You can simply look at readily accessible state level U.S. data to see this really isn’t true, since people don’t use birth control for lack of cost, but rather because they simply don’t want to.
I don’t think you really want to go down this track. I mean, I’m game for it, though I’ve found that 90% of the stuff I post gets ignored anyway.
As it is, the central premise of these threads/studies always starts from two false assumptions-- “women have abortions because they can’t afford birth control” and “women weigh the cost of using birth control against the cost of an abortion”-- when the correct statements are that “women have abortions even though they have easy access to birth control” and “women weigh the cost of birth control against the cost of having a child and the cost of an abortion against the cost of having a child, not the cost of birth control against the cost of an abortion”.
Again, there is state level data and multiple studies which back this up, as incredulous as it seems.
If I were a rich billionaire, I would set up stands all over the country and give out nothing except over-the-counter contraceptives and information on how to get more.