Ah, but we can't separate pregnancy. That's not fair! It's a risk of sex. It's kind of a gray area, and it will depend on the question you're asking. In this case we're talking about age of consent, mostly in respect to adults having sex with minors. One could make the argument that having an adult in the equation increases the likelihood of protection being used. Certainly it's easier for an adult to buy condoms than a kid, right? So if we look at the numbers another way, maybe those minors who have sex are better off having sex with adults because their life outcomes are better.
Thanks for proving, after accusing me of arguing out of emotion rather than facts, that you actually have not spent one single solitary minute studying actual hard data on this matter. In fact, you haven't even bothered to click the links that have had such studies in this very thread.
But that's not surprising, considering its obvious the only reason you are in this thread is to be contentious. You have no interest in actually objectively viewing the matter at hand from a studious standpoint.
Yes, pregnancy is a risk when having sex for adults too. The difference is the risk that pregnancy poses to young teens (and the baby) vs mature women.
1. Pregnancy is more dangerous and results in higher complication and death rates for children and mothers when the mother is a young teen, compared to the dangers for older teens and above
2. One of the single biggest factors which affects both a woman's life and her child's life is the age at which she has children. This is still true when controlling for other social factors, like poverty. Teenage mothers are more likely to drop out of high school and be impoverished, and their children are at an incredibly higher risk of being high school drop outs and criminals.
3. Young women who have sex with adult men use condoms LESS OFTEN then when they have sex with kids their age. Typically because uneducated girls are more likely to have sex with older men. One would HOPE that the men themselves, beign adults, would take the responsibility themselves to use protection, but statistics show that is not the case. Men who have sex with teens use protection at a far lesser rate than men who have sex with women their own age. And girls who have sex with adult men use protection less than girls who have sex with boys their age. They get STDs and become pregnant at a vastly higher rate when they have sex with older men than with boys their own age.
But let me guess, you'll pull another straw man argument about how this is all based on some "Puritan view of sex." Please. Even the most sexually liberal countries in the world - the Netherlands, Scandanavia, Germany, who are (and rightly so) praised world wide at the effectiveness of their sexual education programs, have as the central part of that education the goal of
preventing younger teens from having sex. They all sought, through sexual education, to raise the age at which teens were having sex. In fact, in the Netherlands now, the average age at which people first start having sex is
17.7 years. This is a direct result of their public education campaign to do just that - make sure kids were waiting to have sex.
This is because they, unlike you, actually did comprehensive studies on the dangerousness that teen pregnancy poses to teens, their children, and the society those children grow up in. They decided that their top priority in sexual education was preventing kids from having sex. So despite being the most liberal societies in terms of sex, their public policies still reflect a priority on preventing sex in young teens.
Why are you even on a skeptics blog, UY? It's obvious you don't care a single thing about using studies and data to forumlate an opinion. You're just here to fight.
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