Here’s an article on the effects of planned vs unplanned pregnancies on married and unmarried cohabiting couples. (My google search “unintended fertility marital dissolution”. In academia, half the battle is knowing what terms to use.) I just skimmed, but the final model indicates that couples in which both partners did not intend for the most recent pregnancy to occur are 3.5 times more likely to break up than couples in which both partners did intend the most recent pregnancy.
An interesting tidbit the authors mention: Couples that marry after an unintended birth are more likely to break up than those who don’t get married. This is attributed to these couples caving to societal pressure to get married rather than really truly wanting to get married.
Bottom line: evidence suggests that unintended births are bad for relationships, and adding a new marriage into the mix makes things worse.
Apparently he learned the lesson - with the next girlfriend, he used a condom even when she said it was a safe time. But yeah, to trust someone else to take care of birth control was not a wise move. Especially since the first girl’s reputation by the end of high school was that she’d had 5 abortions.
Or it was entirely made up. High school rumors about promiscuous behavior in girls are literally the least reliable type of gossip possible. High school boys flat make this shit up all the time.
And also, there’s not necessarily any correlation between having lots of abortions and getting STDs, especially among teenagers with little previous sexual history.
A late-teen girl who has lots of unprotected but monogamous sex with just one or two partners over the course of four years could easily wind up getting pregnant five times while not being at all “promiscuous” or at high risk for STDs.
Girls make this up about themselves too, for attention. However, I did go to school with a few girls who were like that, and no self-respecting boy would go near them because who knows what they’d walk away with. As for the non-self respecting boys, that was another story. :dubious:
Plus, unless the girls are taking up with older guys (or guys with older women) odds are the venereal disease rate is much lower in high school than when you get into a wider field and a bigger mix, in college and the workforce. Plus, it’s less likely to be hidden if someone starts passing it around a small social group - everyone knows. I expect herpes might have been a problem, but this guy never mentioned any outbreaks of diseases. In this case, it was a small town, so IIRC she was pretty much confined to doing guys from her grade and one or two above. She just had self-respect issues and sex was likely the way she could consider herself worth anything. Sad.