That all boils down to acting responsibly.
A person who relies on condoms alone who fails to use a condom is having exactly the same kind of sex as a person who relies on abstinence alone and fails to do so. You could make an argument for using multiple methods together this way (condoms plus pill, say), but if you’re just comparing one method to one other method, the consequences of failing to use the method are the same.
Did all of those people receive abstinence-only education? If not, then I don’t think that your conclusion logically follows from the premise.
…it’s not. It’s better. That’s the point. Did you misread that paragraph?
NFP doesn’t work? My parents will be interested to learn that, because they’ve been using it successfully for the past twenty-one years at least.
Or increase welfare to single Mothers.
Not all of them no. But of the many people I know, some of them were indeed taught that. Indeed, since my premise is that it works on almost no one, then I can indeed pull in people who weren’t taught abstinence only education because, well, turns out, they fit. There is, of course, something that does work: sex education.
It’s curious to note the many saddlebacking fundie christian abstinence only kids there are. And how how their sti rate is compared against the general population. It’s almost like ignorance is painful.
For people with a low sex drive the so called natural method( which is really no more natural than using birth control. may work for them, as well as abstinence. But for most people it doesn’t and can cause problems. Also for women who do not want to be pregnant all the time cannot relax to have the full enjoyment of sex.
Anybody opposed to abortion should be all for that.
No, I suppose he’s looking at things from a different perspective, where family planning or contraception are one decision, and the method used to achieve that result is fine detail. So once you decide that you can’t afford to have any more children on your pay/ the wife suffers from a disease which would make a pregnancy life-threatening / you have to care for sick family member and simply don’t have the time and strength for a child on top of that / one partner is infected with AIDS from a blood transfusion and doesn’t want to pass it on / other reasons, the pair thus decides to have no more children out of responsibility, then that decision is morally right for their situation.
Why one method to achieve that end is morally correct, although it is unreliable, but other methods are morally wrong and bad, though they achieve the same end of preventing children, is hard to grasp for non-Catholics.
Basically, it comes down to “the Pope said so”. It’s not logically outside the system of the Pope having special wisdom because of his position.
The argument the Pope himself used (couched in very indirect words), is (Humane Vitae)
, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to non-Catholics.
That’s why I said snarky: I was exaggerting. The pearl index for Knaus-Ogino is between 9 and 40, higher than any other method. It’s nice that it works for your parents, but anecdote =! data.
For most couples who practice Knaus-Ogino, or even the improved NFP method with thermometers and measuring slime, the risk of getting pregnant despite this is higher than with condoms or the pill, and a lot of couples do get pregnant with this method.
One of the most basic problems, whether with the old calendar method, or the improved slime and temp., method, is that you make assumptions about the future based on the past and about individual body reactions based on mass measurements. Individually, the hormone cycle and temp. can be thrown off due to a variance of causes.
The condom, in contrast, is a physical barrier that stops sperm regardless of the hormones at that moment.
Boy I am so glad all of this is natural.
There’s a big difference between saying that they were taught to practice abstinence and receiving pure “abstinence-only education.” For example, who taught them these things? Was it from their parents? Was this message contradicted by what they heard in the schools? And when you say that they were “taught that,” was this something they were taught at one or more points, or was it a consistent message that they received through some sort of formal pedagogical program?
Again, regardless of whether abstinence-only teaching works or not, I don’t think we can draw any reasonable conclusion from the fact that your friends all had sex – especially without any specifics regarding the manner in which they were taught or the consistency of this message.
A good number of people I know go to religious schools. Some of them wanted to become priests or nuns and other such things. While I can’t speak to the extent of their education as I wasn’t there each day of their lives, as with so many other things in life we accept what is generally done as being applicable to any particular individual we meet. I suppose I could poll them all, if you’d really like.
But they all, except one, had premarital sex.
Which is still not the same as receiving an abstinence-only education. Some religious schools do not address this topic at all, for example, and some of them are downright liberal. We also have to ask whether these people attended these schools exclusively or not, among other things.
There’s a reason why I raise these points. People are way too quick to jump on isolated data points as “proof” that abstinence-only teaching does not work. Perhaps the best example of this is the way Sarah Palin was eviscerated when her daughter Bristol got pregnant. “See! Abstinence-only teaching is a failure!” a great many Dopers exclaimed, even though Bristol herself did NOT receive abstinence-only teaching in school.
Heck, even if she did, this single failure would not mean that abstinence-only teaching is to blame. If somebody’s condom were to break, or if someone were to get pregnant despite the use of contraception, few of us would point to that and exclaim “Aha! This proves that safe sex programs are a failure!” Yet if someone gets pregnant despite abstinence-based education, this is trumpeted as proof that such teachings are abysmally ineffective.
This is why I’m being kinda hard on you, friend. Your experiences don’t demonstrate that abstinence-only teaching is a failure – especially if we don’t have knowledge that these friends of yours did receive such education. If one wants to argue that it is a failure, then one needs to use a firmer foundation and apply the same criteria for effectiveness that one would use when preaching the use of condoms and other so-called “safe sex” techniques.
Some religions don’t advocate stoning people to death, either. What’s the point? Because some religious schools don’t require this doesn’t somehow immunize the great number of them which do.
It doesn’t work. There’s a far cry of difference between teaching people to discriminate against sleeping around capriciously but understanding that it’s going to happen and thus preparing people to do it smartly and just saying that it’s the only way to go. And the latter happens in most religious schools, and under the last administration it was tried to be pushed into the public schools.
Yes, because showing that only one person of all those I know who was taught it followed wouldn’t indicate the outcome you predict. Of course, not. It stands completely in opposition to your claim that one failure doesn’t ruin it; it’s one success.
We have precisely said that if a person who is taught abstinence only, and that condoms are immoral necessarily has unsafe each time they shag, while there is only the possibility that sex with a condom is unsafe. There’s a difference between all instances of the subset necessarily being something and some members of the subset being potentially the case.
There aren’t my experiences; these are the experiences of people I actually know. All of my sex is safer because I’m not so foolish to buy into the abstinence only bit. There is no good reason to think that denying one’s self pleasure is wise, and good reason to suggest that denying one’s self such is harmful. Or, in the very least, is just unpleasant.
But what I think isn’t ultimately what’s relevant. That the abstinence only proselyting fails miserably is what is relevant.
Catholics are generally pretty amenable to socialism on the whole.
Non-American-Rightwing-Catholics. American rightwing Catholics (like Bill Donoghue), on the other hand, are actually more conservative than the Pope (which is really something you have to TRY at with this one).
Catholics as a whole in America tend to vote Democrat though. They make up a very large proportion of the socially conservative wing of the Democratic party.
And what evidence do you have that Donohue is fiscally conservative? I really don’t know what his positions on economic policy are.
It’s a funny thing, Catholic social policy is liberal even almost socialist. Read some of those encyclicals about business written in the 19th century, workers have to be paid a living wage, workers are just not a means of production, the purpose of business is not just to make money. It’s a shame we don’t hear much of that anymore it’s all about sex and abortion.
Well if you don’t hear about it that shows what you are focusing on or more pertinently what the news sources you rely on focus on. The Catholic church talks about a whole lot of things other than sex and abortion.
It’s my understanding that Catholics as a whole are actually something of a bellwether demographic in the US. There are Catholics on the right and left (those on the right being largely due to the abortion issue), and whether the right or left is dominant among Catholics is reflective of which is dominant in the country as a whole.