About 34,000 people die in car crashes each year and the US government spends buckets of money trying to get that number lower every year. The US government is currently doing fuckall to reduce the number of child marriages within US borders. I think we can do better while simultaneously continuing to pressure the government of India to do better on the same issue.
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When I hear people say that, they mean it in the same way that ‘avoiding getting into knife fights is a better way of protecting yourself from knife injuries than a buckler’. But it is in a vacuum and doesn’t posit a world where a primary genetic goal of humans and all lifeforms is to get into knife fights.
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Beat me to it!
(Now where’s that “why not both” gif?)
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It’s like saying “abstaining from food is naturally the best way to avoid being overweight”
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If the goal is “reduce teen pregnancy,” the best solution is abstinence. I don’t believe that anyone will be able to come up with a cogent argument against that point. But when people say “My goal is to reduce teen pregnancy,” they often mean “My goal is to reduce teen pregnancy while still allowing teens to experiment with and experience their sexual selves.” With that as the goal, abstinence stops being the best solution.
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dunno if I would call a solution “best” if it needs to be enforced against everything evolution built into the human wetware
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Or more damning, it is a “solution” that assumes that teenagers won’t have sex if they aren’t allowed to have sex. They will and they do. It’s only the best solution in a world that is not ours.
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This is the same argument that leads to people saying ‘well, Vitamin C cures cancer!’
“Well but not in clinical studies of humans”
“But in a lab it does!”
“Oh, okay. So it DOES do that, but not in a way that’s meaningful or useful to humanity.” The exact same argument applies to abstinence to prevent pregnancy.
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I am not minimizing anything – the actual numbers do all the minimizing for me. They are a blip in the statistical universe of US marriages. For the record, I find the practice abhorrent.
Admittedly, even a small problem is still a problem. It appears, however, that there are those out there addressing the issue, such as Ms. Reiss’ UaL organization.
Does the scope of this issue truly warrant a federally funded domestic response? (Progressives: “Doesn’t everything?”) Given that marriage laws are within the purview of the states, shouldn’t the states be responsible for taking the lead in fixing these issues?
If child marriage is a blip in the statistical universe of US marriage, then homicide (by which I mean one person killing a different person) is a blip in the statistical universe of US deaths.
Does the scope of this issue truly warrant a federally funded domestic response?
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Ignoring the reality of being a teenager by pushing abstinence as the best way to reduce pregnancy rates among people who are going to have sex anyway is irresponsible on the societal level. If you really want to reduce teen pregnancy, you educate kids on all the ways how to prevent pregnancy and you don’t make contraceptives difficult to obtain.
How do you think the feds got the drinking age set uniformly across the 50 states? Hint: it wasn’t by asking nicely. Why wouldn’t economic pressure be a viable way to get the minimum age of marriage set to the Age of Majority across the 50 states?
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From the standpoint of not getting preggers or risking a disease’ it is. That does not mean the other methods are bad, just that there is a non-zero chance even in the best use case increased by real world gaffs, flubs, and ‘eh close enough.’
That’s kinda like saying you can’t get in a car wreck if you don’t get in a car though and people love driving, so since you’re gonna drive buckle the fuck up.
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Abstinence isn’t a solution, it’s a tautology. If you look at the percentages of teen pregnancy from people in abstinence-only states, it greatly exceeds that of those with comprehensive sex education..
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Its a pretty terrible point.
Marriage is a legal construct. There is no reason any underage marriages should be allowed. Yes, there will still be de-facto child brides but at least they won’t have the imprimatur of the state and instead will be officially categorized as a crime, just like any other form of statutory rape.
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Yes, the Reagan economic blackmail model is one we should continue to support. ffs
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A little more digging turns up this report that breaks out a little more detail:
Table 1, Marital History for People 15 Years Old and Over by Age and Sex: 2008–2012, reports .5 percent of men and .6 percent of women in the 15-17 age group report being married. That’s out of a population total of 6.5 million for the men, and 6.2 million for the women. So: 37,000 women and 32,000 men for a roughly four period in the survey.
That’s from the American Community Survey.
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Abstinence is “the best solution”. Trying to enforce abstinence is one of the worst.
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It achieved a compelling national interest in greatly reducing the number of drunk driving fatalities, especially among teenagers, which was the ultimate goal. Do you think improving lifetime outcomes for all young women in the US is not a compelling national interest?
Also, if you don’t like the blackmail model, why not simply pass a federal law under the banner of Promoting the General Welfare? Also, as pointed out above, from the perspective of government, marriage is a contract, and children are not permitted to enter into contracts. A federal law would clarify that for recalcitrant states.
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Man, you’d think the effort required to set a reasonable marriage age in this country is positively herculean. Think of all the lost work, the riots, the massive strikes, the billions and billions of dollars. Why, with all of that sturm und drang we could be curing HIV or going to Mars or something.
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If the goal starts with the premise that teenagers are human beings, then requiring abstinence to reduce unwanted teen pregnancy is not the best solution.
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