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jonathanlydall 38 minutes ago

Where I am from, organised political movements are not a factor of teen pregnancy and were not the least bit in my mind when I made my statement.

And my two examples are completely arbitrary because my point applies to pretty much any problem which would be solved by people being “more careful”.

So, political/religious elements aside, teen pregnancy and road safety are the same in terms of “if people were just more disciplined, there would not be these problems” (i.e. if teens who have easy access to contraceptives planned ahead before giving into impulsiveness; if drivers were more attentive to their behaviour), which I then pointed out is naive because the reality is that people aren’t perfect, they aren’t always disciplined, we’re all only human.

Hence, we need other solutions to help with problems which don’t require ignoring that people are only human and lack perfect discipline.

I agree that some organised movements can be a problem in that they can make other problems worse.

saghm 19 minutes ago | parent [-]

My point is that teen pregnancy very much does have a solution that has empirically worked quite well at preventing it when it's actually practiced (i.e. high quality sex education and ample access to contraceptives), and pushing abstinence as a solution has demonstrably caused teen pregnancy rates in increase whenever it's used as a replacement for that; the only actual impetus for abstinence as a "solution" is ideological. I think teen pregnancy literally would be a solved problem (with instances being essentially a rounding error) in a society embracing what we actually have proven works well at preventing it; I've never seen any similarly successful mechanism at preventing injuries or deaths in automobile accidents be rejected by a society for ideological reasons.

Trying to handwave away the things we know work to prevent teen pregnancy as "just be careful" feels overly reductive, because it's way easier to do correctly than managing to drive without ever having an accident.