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So you're seeing that giving kids birth control reduces teen pregnancy? Shocking. Everyone knew this would happen, but some believe that giving teens birth con

So you're seeing that giving kids birth control reduces teen pregnancy? Shocking. Everyone knew this would happen, but some believe that giving teens birth control is encouraging them to have sex, so initiatives like this are almost always blocked. It's very much a political problem.

pavel_lishin 11y ago
It's very much a "we're not fighting teen pregnancy, we're fighting teen sex" problem.
dylanjermiah 11y ago
>but some believe that giving teens birth control is encouraging them to have sex I don't understand, encouraging them to use contraception while having sex (and perhaps lead to more intercourse)? or encourage more unprotected sex?
- aidos 11y ago
  Encouraging them to have sex at all, presumably. If you help with contraception, it's an implicit endorsement of sexual intercourse (at least, that's what many would argue).
- noelwelsh 11y ago
  A vocal chunk of the US still believes that access to contraception will lead to a mass outbreak of fucking amongst the youth. Look in this very thread and you will see much hang-wringing about STI rates, which is a code-word for OMG-the-youth-are-getting-it-on. As if they weren't already (pregnancy rates are dropping ...), as if this was somehow wrong (if anything is natural, sex is), as if there were huge surges of STI rates in countries without these hangups about sex, and so on.
- balls187 11y ago
  The former. The logic certain politicians in the US use is that the only acceptable form of birth control the government can support is abstinence. This is often tied to Judeo-christian beliefs, and often used to gain favor with the conservative base. If the consequences of sex (i.e. pregnancy) are mitigated, it will encourage teenagers to have sex. Typically there is some form of slut shaming that happens during the debate on birth control.
- seiji 11y ago
  and perhaps lead to more intercourse In America, the popular public society-wide meme opinion is "sex is bad outside of procreation." You're not allowed to encourage it, you're not allowed to make it safer, and many doctors aren't even comfortable talking about it. Running a "birth-free sex" program is an affront to the victorian sensibilities of genital shame and a general war on happiness. The one true path is dedication to god and hard work, not personal enjoyment of anything. And we're going to have our 80 year old half-senile business moguls fund all politicians to ensure sex is always dangerous, unsafe, and bad for you.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    Heh, i recall reading the experience of someone from some Nordic nation or other who went to USA to visit his in-laws to be. "Back home" they were sharing a bed and sleeping in their undies each night. While visiting it was pajamas and sleeping in different ends of the house.
    - seiji 11y ago
      That's reasonably common in the US if the parents are religious. If the kid and their significant other are visiting parents and aren't married then they aren't allowed to sleep in the same room (because they might do shenanigans!).
      - digi_owl 11y ago
        I see i forgot to include that i think the couple was both well into their 20s, just not married (yet).
        seiji 11y ago
        They are still children in the eyes of their parents. :) Doesn't matter if it's 20/30/40, you still need to be protected from the temptation of living in sin.
        11y ago
- deelowe 11y ago
  It's seen as implicit approval of teen sex. Period. The issue is that acknowledgement of birth control as a valid form of contraception also acknowledges that a significant number of teens have sex. The conservative religious crowd feel that this isn't the right solution. They don't want "underage sex" to be seen as something that's so commonplace that contraceptive is readily available. They feel it's taboo and offering tools that lessen the risk of underage sex is also taboo. As another person stated, some aren't interested in fighting teen pregnancy and poverty. They are interested in fighting teen sex. Two very different things.
  - mikeash 11y ago
    For a really dramatic example of this, look at the controversy over the HPV vaccine. People fought the vaccine viciously. They would rather have people die than do something they see as encouraging sex before marriage.
- Ntrails 11y ago
  The former. By telling people 'how' to have sex it carries an implication of approval. This will lead, logically, to more people thinking it's ok to have sex (otherwise why would they be being told how). This probably does increase the levels of total sex-having somewhat, but it also allows for much much higher levels of safe and informed sex having. Apparently this is not always considered an acceptable trade off.
  - XorNot 11y ago
    This has been shown to be wrong. Basically the only thing abstinence only education does is delay by a year or two, the age at which people first have sex. Then they proceed to have higher rates of every negative outcome.
    - Ntrails 11y ago
      So what you are saying is that people have sex later, thereby there is less sex having, which is exactly what the abstinence teachers want. Then you say higher rates of negative outcome, without mentioning whether you consider rate of sex having to be a negative outcome. (I don't disagree with the assessment, it follows the exact logic I posited. I'm not sure why you're taking my comment as being in support of abstinence - it clearly isn't)
eli_gottlieb 11y ago
>Everyone knew this would happen, but some believe that giving teens birth control is encouraging them to have sex I don't see the problem.
- a8da6b0c91d 11y ago
  There is an STD pandemic. Multi-drug resistant STIs are rapidly spreading. The "sexual revolution" was basically the twenty year period when a shot of penicillin cleared anything up. That's over.
  - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
    >There is an STD pandemic. Multi-drug resistant STIs are rapidly spreading. As a happily, permanently monogamous individual who knows nothing about this... could I get some sources on that?
rdudek 11y ago
Not shocking, this is common knowledge and I'm glad this actually helps the poor folks. Raising a family is tough.
genericuser 11y ago
I agree, but the people who write head lines understand that including the word 'Startling' increases their clicks dramatically, despite the fact it would of been more accurate without that word added.
scarmig 11y ago
I don't know the data, but it doesn't strike me as insane to think that decreasing the marginal cost of a subset of sex would increase overall amounts of sex. It's just that optimizing over "minimizing sex" is idiotic compared to optimizing over "minimizing unsafe sex."
- austenallred 11y ago
  That's exactly what it is. Different groups optimizing for different outcomes. For most religious folk, teens having sex is bad regardless of whether it's safe or not, so it makes sense to push for abstinence-only education. Giving out condoms is like giving up. Or maybe even slightly worse than giving up - implicitly encouraging kids to go out and have sex. Of course, this doesn't stop kids from having sex, but it does make it so that when they do they're generally unprotected.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - GuiA 11y ago
    I've worked heavily with teenagers over the past 10 years, mostly in the context of summer camps (where 40 teenagers are spending 3 weeks of their summer in close quarter). Where I'm from, France, you need a state certificate to work as an educator (BAFA), which is issued after a few weeks of training. In my first week of training, which is mostly "theoretical", we had a debate about whether to carry condoms in the camp's sanitary supplies, to give them to teenagers if they ask for them. There is no legal imperative in France - it's mostly at the discretion of the camp director/organizer. I was against, because I was a 17 year old teenager full of convictions (albeit not religious ones) that having condoms available was implicitly encouraging teenagers to have sex. Then I worked in actual teenage camps and realized how much of an idiot I was. No matter how vigilant and organized the educators are, the fact is that you have 40 teenagers full of hormones living together for 3 weeks. If you don't want STDs/pregnancies, you need condoms. Anytime I hear people advocating the opposite, it becomes clear to me that they are deluded idealists and that they've never had to manage a community of teenagers.
euroclydon 11y ago
> but some believe that giving teens birth control is encouraging them to have sex Do teenagers really need to be encouraged to have sex? An absence of discouragement should be sufficient, for mutually attracted pairs. High-availability abortions and contraceptives given out in schools are just examples of governments giving people what they want. However many in the anti-abortion and abstinence movements are engaged in an ambitious social engineering effort, telling teens to resist their strong biological urges to have sex, in favor of marriage and monogamy, because they believe this leads to a more spiritually healthy outcome, long-term. There is surprisingly little innovation in this space. It's taken for granted that teenage-pregnancy is a bad word, that 30-40 year olds make better parents because they have more money. Society could choose to support early marriage and childbirth. Parenting requires a lot of energy, something that youth have in abundance. Also, young people remember what it's like to be a child, and make more empathetic parents.
- donohoe 11y ago
  Gonna have to disagree with you on that last paragraph. You make very broad assumptions that I'd dispute as an accurate generalization. As a dad to 2 kids (became a father at 28) I would strongly urge people to wait until they were 30-38 before having kids. Given the great innovations in this space I'd even say 40 is a great age to have kids - though it gets harder with age beyond this imho.
  - ta92929 11y ago
    Why do you feel that way? Biologically that's not really the way humans were designed. It's unfortunate that the modern first world economy and society is so incompatible with biology.
  - facepalm 11y ago
    I had my first kid with 38 and I wish it would have been sooner. I love having a kid now. But I worry about staying healthy enough to do the fun things I want to do with them. And grandparents are a major factor, too. They are a great help, and also they really enjoy being with their children. Supposing my kids also wait until they are 38 to have kids, my odds at enjoying quality time with grandchildren are greatly reduced. I'll probably be almost of pension age when my kids finish their education. That's another thing where I worry I might not be able to help them out as much as I could if I would still be earning money and connected in the business world. It would perhaps be different if I had toiled and saved money all the time up to age 38, but I didn't. If you have kids, odds are you get more serious about those things.
gwern 11y ago
> Shocking. Everything needs to be tested. How many treatments, therapies, and drugs seem like pure common sense and then turn out to be useless when rigorously examined or outright harmful?

pavel_lishin 11y ago

It's very much a "we're not fighting teen pregnancy, we're fighting teen sex" problem.

dylanjermiah 11y ago

>but some believe that giving teens birth control is encouraging them to have sex I don't understand, encouraging them to use contraception while having sex (and perhaps lead to more intercourse)? or encourage more unprotected sex?

aidos 11y ago
Encouraging them to have sex at all, presumably. If you help with contraception, it's an implicit endorsement of sexual intercourse (at least, that's what many would argue).
noelwelsh 11y ago
A vocal chunk of the US still believes that access to contraception will lead to a mass outbreak of fucking amongst the youth. Look in this very thread and you will see much hang-wringing about STI rates, which is a code-word for OMG-the-youth-are-getting-it-on. As if they weren't already (pregnancy rates are dropping ...), as if this was somehow wrong (if anything is natural, sex is), as if there were huge surges of STI rates in countries without these hangups about sex, and so on.
balls187 11y ago
The former. The logic certain politicians in the US use is that the only acceptable form of birth control the government can support is abstinence. This is often tied to Judeo-christian beliefs, and often used to gain favor with the conservative base. If the consequences of sex (i.e. pregnancy) are mitigated, it will encourage teenagers to have sex. Typically there is some form of slut shaming that happens during the debate on birth control.
seiji 11y ago
and perhaps lead to more intercourse In America, the popular public society-wide meme opinion is "sex is bad outside of procreation." You're not allowed to encourage it, you're not allowed to make it safer, and many doctors aren't even comfortable talking about it. Running a "birth-free sex" program is an affront to the victorian sensibilities of genital shame and a general war on happiness. The one true path is dedication to god and hard work, not personal enjoyment of anything. And we're going to have our 80 year old half-senile business moguls fund all politicians to ensure sex is always dangerous, unsafe, and bad for you.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Heh, i recall reading the experience of someone from some Nordic nation or other who went to USA to visit his in-laws to be. "Back home" they were sharing a bed and sleeping in their undies each night. While visiting it was pajamas and sleeping in different ends of the house.
  - seiji 11y ago
    That's reasonably common in the US if the parents are religious. If the kid and their significant other are visiting parents and aren't married then they aren't allowed to sleep in the same room (because they might do shenanigans!).
    - digi_owl 11y ago
      I see i forgot to include that i think the couple was both well into their 20s, just not married (yet).
      - seiji 11y ago
        They are still children in the eyes of their parents. :) Doesn't matter if it's 20/30/40, you still need to be protected from the temptation of living in sin.
        11y ago
deelowe 11y ago
It's seen as implicit approval of teen sex. Period. The issue is that acknowledgement of birth control as a valid form of contraception also acknowledges that a significant number of teens have sex. The conservative religious crowd feel that this isn't the right solution. They don't want "underage sex" to be seen as something that's so commonplace that contraceptive is readily available. They feel it's taboo and offering tools that lessen the risk of underage sex is also taboo. As another person stated, some aren't interested in fighting teen pregnancy and poverty. They are interested in fighting teen sex. Two very different things.
- mikeash 11y ago
  For a really dramatic example of this, look at the controversy over the HPV vaccine. People fought the vaccine viciously. They would rather have people die than do something they see as encouraging sex before marriage.
Ntrails 11y ago
The former. By telling people 'how' to have sex it carries an implication of approval. This will lead, logically, to more people thinking it's ok to have sex (otherwise why would they be being told how). This probably does increase the levels of total sex-having somewhat, but it also allows for much much higher levels of safe and informed sex having. Apparently this is not always considered an acceptable trade off.
- XorNot 11y ago
  This has been shown to be wrong. Basically the only thing abstinence only education does is delay by a year or two, the age at which people first have sex. Then they proceed to have higher rates of every negative outcome.
  - Ntrails 11y ago
    So what you are saying is that people have sex later, thereby there is less sex having, which is exactly what the abstinence teachers want. Then you say higher rates of negative outcome, without mentioning whether you consider rate of sex having to be a negative outcome. (I don't disagree with the assessment, it follows the exact logic I posited. I'm not sure why you're taking my comment as being in support of abstinence - it clearly isn't)

eli_gottlieb 11y ago

>Everyone knew this would happen, but some believe that giving teens birth control is encouraging them to have sex I don't see the problem.

a8da6b0c91d 11y ago
There is an STD pandemic. Multi-drug resistant STIs are rapidly spreading. The "sexual revolution" was basically the twenty year period when a shot of penicillin cleared anything up. That's over.
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  >There is an STD pandemic. Multi-drug resistant STIs are rapidly spreading. As a happily, permanently monogamous individual who knows nothing about this... could I get some sources on that?

rdudek 11y ago

Not shocking, this is common knowledge and I'm glad this actually helps the poor folks. Raising a family is tough.

genericuser 11y ago

I agree, but the people who write head lines understand that including the word 'Startling' increases their clicks dramatically, despite the fact it would of been more accurate without that word added.

scarmig 11y ago

I don't know the data, but it doesn't strike me as insane to think that decreasing the marginal cost of a subset of sex would increase overall amounts of sex. It's just that optimizing over "minimizing sex" is idiotic compared to optimizing over "minimizing unsafe sex."

austenallred 11y ago
That's exactly what it is. Different groups optimizing for different outcomes. For most religious folk, teens having sex is bad regardless of whether it's safe or not, so it makes sense to push for abstinence-only education. Giving out condoms is like giving up. Or maybe even slightly worse than giving up - implicitly encouraging kids to go out and have sex. Of course, this doesn't stop kids from having sex, but it does make it so that when they do they're generally unprotected.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- GuiA 11y ago
  I've worked heavily with teenagers over the past 10 years, mostly in the context of summer camps (where 40 teenagers are spending 3 weeks of their summer in close quarter). Where I'm from, France, you need a state certificate to work as an educator (BAFA), which is issued after a few weeks of training. In my first week of training, which is mostly "theoretical", we had a debate about whether to carry condoms in the camp's sanitary supplies, to give them to teenagers if they ask for them. There is no legal imperative in France - it's mostly at the discretion of the camp director/organizer. I was against, because I was a 17 year old teenager full of convictions (albeit not religious ones) that having condoms available was implicitly encouraging teenagers to have sex. Then I worked in actual teenage camps and realized how much of an idiot I was. No matter how vigilant and organized the educators are, the fact is that you have 40 teenagers full of hormones living together for 3 weeks. If you don't want STDs/pregnancies, you need condoms. Anytime I hear people advocating the opposite, it becomes clear to me that they are deluded idealists and that they've never had to manage a community of teenagers.

euroclydon 11y ago

> but some believe that giving teens birth control is encouraging them to have sex Do teenagers really need to be encouraged to have sex? An absence of discouragement should be sufficient, for mutually attracted pairs. High-availability abortions and contraceptives given out in schools are just examples of governments giving people what they want. However many in the anti-abortion and abstinence movements are engaged in an ambitious social engineering effort, telling teens to resist their strong biological urges to have sex, in favor of marriage and monogamy, because they believe this leads to a more spiritually healthy outcome, long-term. There is surprisingly little innovation in this space. It's taken for granted that teenage-pregnancy is a bad word, that 30-40 year olds make better parents because they have more money. Society could choose to support early marriage and childbirth. Parenting requires a lot of energy, something that youth have in abundance. Also, young people remember what it's like to be a child, and make more empathetic parents.

donohoe 11y ago
Gonna have to disagree with you on that last paragraph. You make very broad assumptions that I'd dispute as an accurate generalization. As a dad to 2 kids (became a father at 28) I would strongly urge people to wait until they were 30-38 before having kids. Given the great innovations in this space I'd even say 40 is a great age to have kids - though it gets harder with age beyond this imho.
- ta92929 11y ago
  Why do you feel that way? Biologically that's not really the way humans were designed. It's unfortunate that the modern first world economy and society is so incompatible with biology.
- facepalm 11y ago
  I had my first kid with 38 and I wish it would have been sooner. I love having a kid now. But I worry about staying healthy enough to do the fun things I want to do with them. And grandparents are a major factor, too. They are a great help, and also they really enjoy being with their children. Supposing my kids also wait until they are 38 to have kids, my odds at enjoying quality time with grandchildren are greatly reduced. I'll probably be almost of pension age when my kids finish their education. That's another thing where I worry I might not be able to help them out as much as I could if I would still be earning money and connected in the business world. It would perhaps be different if I had toiled and saved money all the time up to age 38, but I didn't. If you have kids, odds are you get more serious about those things.

gwern 11y ago

> Shocking. Everything needs to be tested. How many treatments, therapies, and drugs seem like pure common sense and then turn out to be useless when rigorously examined or outright harmful?