Well, I consider it an absolute moral imperative of the first order to make it possible for a woman to have sex without the risk of pregnancy hovering over her every time she does.
Only if you are female–have you noticed that? Does it ever strike you that this is an arrangement that sets men and women up as adversaries, situationally poised to try their best to manipulate each other? Don’t you feel ANY moral compunction to try to bring an end to this patriarchal cesspool of sexualized opposition, if we can?
You can’t explain it and I can’t comprehend it. One significant consequence of sex up until the last century was a chance to get dead of childbirth complications. Does it bug you that puerperal fever has been largely eliminated? Would it be a real bummer for you if someone came up with a cure for AIDS, herpes, syphilis, gonorrhea, and chlamydia?
::shaking head in bewilderment:: Sexuality and its expressions should have, as their consequents, the range of sensations and emotions that they put you through. Reproduction is best brought under our volitional control, though; there is no reason you should have to have sex to reproduce, or should have to reproduce as a result of sex.
Four hundred years ago, people came into physical puberty at roughly the same time they were of social age to begin comporting themselves as adults. For the cultures and classes for whom marriage was an imperative, it was a reasonable marrying age; for other cultures and classes, other options for being sexually active were structured as available. Twelve thousand years ago, people came into physical puberty and became sexually active; pregnancies occurred, and when they did, the hunter-gatherer tribes of which we were composed most likely ensured that the young mom and her kid got their share of the food, for which each individual labored an estimated average of 8 hours per week.
But nowadays, people start coming into physical puberty as early as 10 (for the girls at least) but are not socially established in a position where they can effectively reproduce without putting hardships on their families or society at large (or both) for at least another 10, more often closer to 20 years. So we have a social problem.
And the social problem is NOT that “underage kids are having sex before marriage” or “…before they are in a situation where it is appropriate to reproduce”, but rather that we are putting our adolescents and youth through a totally unreasonable and uncomfortable no-win situation.
And THAT is a sin.
