What would the rate of teen pregnancy be if the teen (boy) knew going into the sexual relationship that if she got pregnant he would have to marry and support?
Groan. Same ol’ SA. Same ol’ no answers.
Quote the first
Quote the second
So, is it sexual activity, or pregnancy? Pregnancy, or sexual activity? Enquiring minds, and all that…
Apparently, it would be higher - since shotgun weddings appear to have done little to keep kids from fuckin’ in the '50s.
I’m betting spousal abuse would be higher, though.
Do you even read this stuff before posting it? You understand that the capital city of the Netherlands is famous for its legal weed and legal prostitutes, yes?
Jesus tapdancing Christ. I always thought of your arguments as somewhat sensible, even if you couldn’t back them up - but this is by far the most ridiculous thing I’ve read on these boards. You made it all up and actually posted it apparently thinking everyone wouldn’t start laughing uncontrollably?
Well, maybe “I burning your dog” has it beat… but not by much.
It seems to me that the likeliest conclusion to be drawn from this thread is that, these things tending in cycles (see the cites on 17th and 18th century statistics), the current cycle of higher teen pregnancies began as a result of cultural shakeups caused by WWII, peaked in the 50s (with some numbers being artificially lowered by the higher incidence of shotgun weddings), and began to decline with the advent of realistic sex education and safe medical alternatives, i.e. contraception and abortion, with a relative low–though it remains a problem–today.
The trend seems clear: to continue improving the situation we need to eliminate abstinence education, and provide better access to legal medical alternatives.
Pretty clearly a liberal triumph in the face of failed conservative policies. Thanks Bricker.
It is both, and both are symptoms of the larger disease, which for want of a better term could be called liberal permissiveness. All of the things I’ve been writing about – faulty education, criminals prematurely on the streets, soaring STDs, etc., are all the result of liberal permissiveness and therefore fall under its umbrella. Bricker has chosen to focus on the issue of teen pregnancy rates for now in order to try to determine whether I’m right or whether my opponents are, and so the comment I made about unwed teen pregnancies was posted within that context. The comment regarding the problems caused by sexual activity in people too immature to handle it was in response to a poster who suggested that teen sexual activity was what my problem really was.
So again, they are both problems, and they are both problems caused by liberal permissiveness. Mentioning one doesn’t exclude the other.
sigh :rolleyes:
Of course I realize it. Not too long ago the Times Square area of NYC was a hotbed of sex and drugs itself. But I realized that NYC was not representative of the country as a whole.
Plus there’s a world of difference between simply making sex and drugs available to those who go looking for it, and actively promoting it from every available outlet. (And with regard to weed, I have no particular problem with it, or even with legalizing it.)
Hah! I knew it!
(Funny how the only positive comments I get on my intelligence and sensibility seem to come from people who’ve never voiced them but suddenly decide they want to retract them.) 
ETA: And now I’m going to bow out for a while. I’m interested to see how this is all going to play out.
If it makes you feel better, in my opinion, I’ve never seen you post anything resembling a cogent argument.
You are simply wrong on this topic, everyone can see it and you pretending to have the high ground isn’t the same thing as winning a debate.
I dunno, as far as I’m concerned, you’re free to say “abortion is taking a life” all you want, and I’ll even agree if it’s the only way to get past the issue. My extreme pro-choice viewpoint doesn’t require diminishing the fetus or in fact redefining it as anything other than a human in mid-gestation. The fetus could be fully sentient and I’d still be pro-choice.
The point, it certainly is possible to justifiably take a life under certain circumstances, and this is one of them, so whether or not you call a fetus “a life” (or attach any other labels designed to elevate or downplay its significance) doesn’t really matter.
That reproduction is mundane isn’t really circular logic, it’s just observation that it was going on long before humanity developed self-awareness, and continues to go on in all the lifeforms around us. That we have some extra brainpower doesn’t mean the stuff we do has a touch of magic to it.
There’s also the question, is the problem that the kids are too young, or that they’re unmarried?
Starving Artist, it’s important to pin down precisely what your position is here, because that will determine which statistics are important. If, for instance, the problem is “teenagers becoming pregnant”, then we’ve come a long way since the 1950s, since the rate of teenage pregnancy has decreased, so if the goal is to reduce teen pregnancy, then that’s a sign that liberalism has it right. If, by contrast, the problem is “birth outside of marriage”, then the situation is reversed, since births outside of marriage are more common now.
Basically, where you’re standing right now is that you’re holding a number of different positions, some of which are proven true by the numbers, some of which are proven false by the numbers, and some of which do not have readily available numbers, and then claiming that all of the positions you’re holding are equivalent.
And this surprises you?
From the pdf I linked to earlier, Percent of premaritally pregnant women marrying before the birth of their first child:
1990-94 23.3%
1985-89 24.7%
1955-59 52.3%
1950-54 53.9%
So, this is where the “shotgun weddings” come in. Roughly fifty percent of the women who were pregnant before marriage got married in a hurry in the fifties. Roughly 25 percent in the late eighties. The link doesn’t have data for later than 1994 in this table.
Is this kind of thing typical of the stringent, fact-based and quality dialog that is supposed to go on in this forum?
A poster makes and attempt to engage me on an honest level and appears to be wanting to take seriously what I’m saying so as to arrive at an answer.
mhendo, fearing that I might actually be taken seriously, jumps in with an ad hominem insult intended to convey to that poster than my arguments are invariably specious and that he’s wasting his time.
So, where’s the debate in what mhendo said? How is he advancing the solution to the OP? What exactly is he accomplishing that is supposed to be the purpose of this forum?
ETA: Chronos, I’m in the middle of something else right now. I’ll answer shortly.
Sure. But what we don’t have is the pregnancy rate in 1957 in the Netherlands. So while it’s true that the unmarried pregnancy rate THEN, for the US, was greater than the rate NOW for the Netherlands, I’m not particularly swayed by that, since forty years can produce all sorts of differences.
It’s not clear to me how the group reached this conclusion, since the link is to a news story about the report, not to the report itself, which presumably has detail that’s lacking in the summary.
In contrast, this 2007 HHS report finds:
This suggests that while abstinence-only education is not more effective than comprehensive sex education, it’s not less effective either. The link provided is to the study itself, so I’d be curious to hear what, if any, flaws in their methodology exist.
I think you’d find that the control group didn’t get supplemental sex education. It got no abstinence education. This means that abstinence only education is no more or less effective than whatever the kids were getting on the street.
We’re evaluating this statement:
I have seen one link to anews story about a study that supposedly supports this claim. I have offered a direct link to another study that explicitly refutes it.
I agree that the second claim – teen pregnancy now in the Netherlands happens at a lower rate than teen pregnancy in the US in the fifties – has been adequately supported.
Yup, you’re right.
So we need to find a study that includes a group that received comprehensive sex education as well as a group that received abstinence-only education.
It also doesn’t have any correlation to shotgun weddings, in which couples had marriage foist upon them by relatives or outside pressures.
How do you determine from these figures how many couples were already in love and intending to get married, but had to move the date up when the girl got pregnant? And how many were in love but had not set a date and then did so once the girl got pregnant? And how many deliberately got pregnant to get out of their parents’ homes or to snag a boy they thought wouldn’t marry them otherwise? And how many couples decided to get the girl pregnant so their parents would allow them to marry?
There were many reasons why young couples got married after the girl had already become pregnant that had nothing to do with their having been forced into it.
Why would it be twice as likely that the couple was in love in the 50’s?
Better: this meta-analysis looks at twelve groups of data from other studies and concludes:
I think that study is about how abstinence is impacted by “abstinence only” versus “comprehensive”. It’s silent on whether one or the other is better for reducing pregnancy or STDs.
Didn’t we just dance to this song? 
This one however: http://www.issuelab.org/click/download2/abstinence_only_vs_comprehensive_sex_education_what_are_the_arguments_what_is_the_evidence/abstinence.pdf <– PDF does get into the differences and finds that a comprehensive approach is better from a health and social direction.
No. The chronology is that I feel liberal permissiveness has, among other ills, resulted in an envioronment where young teenagers – 13 to 17, let’s say – are engaging in sex in vastly greater numbers than occured prior to the counter-culture revolution circa 1968, but which has gotten morphed into the fifties by other posters around here because they feel it’s an easy decade to make fun of, and, being tired of constantly having to refute this, I’ve simply gone with the fifties for purposes of this discussion.
I belive this permissiveness and premature sexual activity is causing a great deal of harm. Among these are abortion; teen pregnancy; a 25% STD infection rate among teenage girls; children raised in single-parent homes, complete with all the disadvantages and problems that usually creates for both the parent and child; and that it harms kids themselves to engage in sex at an age when they’re not yet mature enough to deal with the emotional and libidinal consequences of sexual activity, this last being the very reason for statutory rape laws.
Bricker somehow got sucked into the role of ipso-facto referee in a Pit thread where these things were being argued, and although I tried to spare him by not trying to engage him myself, he wound up playing a certain role in trying to moderate or at least judge the conversation going on in that other thread, and finally decided that there was too much static going on and that perhaps some of these questions could be better decided under the rules and discipline of Great Debates, and he chose a comparison of unwed teen pregnancies between the 1950s and now for the first in a series of my assertions to be debated here.
So while unwed teen pregnancy vis-a-vis the 1950s vs. now is the subject of the thread, comments about my other beliefs get brought up too, even though they don’t have anything to do with the OP, and then people not familiar with what’s going on get confused over what my position is vis-a-vis the subject being discussed.
So for the purposes of this thread it’s my belief that unwed and unwanted teen pregnancies are happening at a greater rate now than they were in the fifties. All the other issues, including the merits or harm of increased sexual activity in young teens, are really subjects for the other threads that Bricker intends to start after this one gets settled.