Why should married people have special privileges?
Utter nonsense - the attitude towards sex has nothing at all to do with abortion. What matters is the attitude towards unborn fetuses, which is closely tied to the strength of the churches in the culture. The proof of this is that sex has been accepted a lot longer than abortion has.
ETA: And abstinence-only programs have never worked. People just worked harder at covering up the results.
I don’t look at sex as evil. I’m decidedly anti-Catholic by the way. My problem is that everyone has this attitude that sex is fun so let’s do it and damn the consequenses. If there are any, I can get an abortion so really there aren’t any consequenses (aside from STDs) to having sex whenever I want it. Abortion and the pill enabled a change in attitude towards sex. And look at what the attitude has done. It has caused you all to respond “abstenence doesn’t work” and “you can’t get people to stop having sex.” If people changed their attitudes towards sex once, why wouldn’t they change their attitude back once they realize it was a mistake? Now we have abortions, and the denial of an unborn’s suffering when it is being aborted, but if abortions were eliminated then I suspect people’s attitudes towards sex would change, despite the results of that flawed poll I have on that subject. In fact some of the married respondents say that they would stop having vaginal sex altogether if abortions were made illegal. (Repealing Roe vs Wade is not the point of this thread BTW.)
Births in the US aren’t the only source of US population. We also have people moving to the US from other countries. In 2006, we had 37 million people here who were not born here. We naturalize about a million a year.
They might just wait until the baby was born, and leave it out for the elements and the wild animals if they didn’t want it. Would that be better?
And if we changed our attitude toward working hard even if we’re paid the same for slacking off, Communism would work. That doesn’t mean such a change is possible, or desirable.
According to census data, our population growth is 0.888% (cite)
It’s true that this is non-negative but I don’t believe that it’s excessive.
You asked if 160,000 were too many unplanned pregnancies - given the earlier number of 8 million sexually active women, that equals .02% of women having unplanned pregnancies. Again, I think we can do better but I don’t think it’s a crisis. It’s never going to be completely 0.0 and you haven’t demonstrated any reason why we should want it to be.
The OP does nothing to support the idea that birth control fails to prevent millions - much less billions - of pregnancies.
I said birth control, healthier attitudes and honest discussion of sex, and abortion were combined are a reasonable solution to unplanned pregnancy. I would consider attempting to curtail sexual behavior to both unhealthy and and a waste of time.
Here’s something your OP doesn’t address - You seem to be saying that the number of unplanned pregnancies has increased since the sexual revolution and the introduction of hormonal birth control and that the way to reverse this is to persuade people to have less sex.
You haven’t demonstrated that the number of unplanned pregnancies has increased in the last 50 years. What was the rate of unplanned pregnancies in 1955 and how has it changed over the years?
Here’s a study from 1995 that says unplanned pregancies were declining thanks to increased access to education and birth control -
Has it gotten worse since then?
Here’s something else you don’t address: the growing disparity in unplanned pregnancies between women living below & above the poverty line.
Here’s another study from 2006 - cite
It’s clear from this study that women who have access to education and BC almost never get pregnant unless they want to.
In other words - this study suggests the problem isn’t rampant sexual freedom but funding for BC for poor women. The easiest answer to that would be free, subsidized, birth control. Something I advocated in my first post.
Finally, your OP doesn’t address the fact that abstinence programs in the last few years have proven to fail miserably. There are many studies out there but here’s a link to the 2007 Congressional study that showed that abstinence eductated middle schoolers were just as likely to have sex as other middle schoolers. cite
You’re arguing that abstinence is the only way to decrease the unwanted pregancy rate but you haven’t demonstrated that abstinence promotion has any actual success at doing so. So far, the evidence suggest it’s useless.
What, never? Well, not after a certain point, obviously (for animals other than humans, too.) But in the first month? How would we know?
You said that abortion is unnatural. My argument is that you are incorrect - it’s perfectly natural for mothers in the wild to end pregnancies or destroy their offspring if caring for them is too difficult. It happens all the time. The urge to abort a fetus is a natural response to circumstances which a mother finds intolerable.
Aborting a fetus is a perfectly reasonable response to an unplanned pregnancy, therefore easier access to abortion would help in preventing unwanted children.
Did I say I supported forced abortions? I used it to show that the only viable solution is a change in attitude towards sex. We can’t force abortions onto people. And we can’t force sterilization. The only “nice” thing we can do is educate and convince people that sex, even protected sex, is dangerous to the public welfare and it should be treated with respect and admiration.
Abortion has existed for a really long time, so I’ll adjust your statement to “legal abortion.” Before legal abortion and the pill, there were still unwanted pregnancies. The sexual revolution didn’t make women more fertile.
Because they have demonstrated a level of commitment to each other that a couple that’s been dating for a few weeks has not. They are further along in their life and more likely able to care for a baby. They are less likely to abort in the case of a pregnancy.
And here’s the crux of your argument, I’d bet.
Wait a second, I’m confused. I thought this thread was about the problem of overpopulation. You claimed there was a dilemma; either we must stop having sex, or we must have (forced?) abortions. Now you are saying we should eliminate abortions so people will stop having sex? This is a different topic entirely.
Check your math. It’s not .02%. It 2%. That is after all the assumed failure rate of perfect condom use.
You’re forgetting that the sexual revolution wasn’t a worldwide phenomenon. It didn’t happen in places like China, India, or the Middle East when it was happening in the Western world. When the sexual revolution happened in the Western world, it coincided with birthrates declining, not increasing. You can’t blame the sexual revolution for high birthrates in places where it didn’t happen.
What people say they might do in a hypothetical thread on a message board, and what people actually do when a situation happens, aren’t necessarily the same thing.
Uh…exactly? That is why I said “Repealing Roe vs Wade is not the point of this thread BTW.” You even quoted it.
“Admiration”?
That’s… not a word I would have tended to use.
Again, you’re hallucinating if people really refrained from having recreational sex before the “sexual revolution”. Attitudes towards actually having sex haven’t changed; only the attitudes towards admitting it in public have.
You think you’re trying to put a genie back into a bottle, but what you’re actually dealing with is an elephant that’s been in the middle of the room the whole time, and we’re now all admitting it. And that elephant isn’t going to fit in your bottle; it never did.
Okay, this made me laugh. Perhaps you forgot that you haven’t finished banning divorce yet.
No, sex DOES NOT equal procreation. We just aren’t built that way. Most sex acts are for other reasons than procreation; most have no chance of producing offspring.
Garbage. Opposition to abortion is all about hatred and contempt towards women, not sex. The attitudes of sex in such a culture is going to be that “women are there to be used”.
Nonsense. They’ve NEVER worked, not in all of history.
And handling sex that way is a perfectly reasonable attitude.
What? Go back to having sex anyway, but treating the woman as a slut or a piece of property? As for stopping sex; that’s never been pulled off even when backed with the threat of torture and executions.
Indeed not. Never mind the chances that that many people would work that hard for reasons other than financial ones. Even just theoretically, all that free-floating altruism would rip any free society apart like a $5 lawn chair in a hurricane.
Please note, it is sodding near impossible for a single woman to get sterilized. I had to have my gyno fight tooth and nail to get permission to snip me after 2 almost fatal pregnancies. It took him almost 8 months of arguing and changing to a different hospital to do so. This was back in the early 80s.
There are a lot of single women who have absolutely no interest in popping a sprog out of their cootchie and it really isnt fair to hold their happiness and reproductive safety out of their grasp. If you have no health issues whatsoever, and are single, and in your early 20s, forget it.
Is that what you thought you did? Sorry, turns out you did the opposite. 100,000 unplanned pregnancies in a year is a pretty impressively small number, for a country with a population as big as our own. Imagine how big it would be if we didn’t have access to birth control!
Merneith, many if your points I addressed in the discussion, not in the OP.