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How is convincing western populations not to do this going?
Follow up question, does abstinence only sex education show any efficacy in preventing pregnancies?
You say this as if there is some consensus effort to try to convince them of this. The reality is that for quite a while now, the dominant consensus has been trying to accomplish the opposite. Unless you think this is just a fully-general argument against any sort of minority view. Like, communism must be wrong, not because it's conceptually wrong or anything, but because it hasn't convinced enough westerners to be communist, for example. This seems like a very strange claim.
My claim is that anyone who says "we should simply tell them to not have sex" as a method of preventing unwanted babies is being willfully ignorant of the fact it's been conclusively demonstrated not to work
Good thing I'm not doing that. Perhaps I need to repeat my claims?
We did a bit of a dosey do here.
I responded to a guy (who I now realize is not you) who was saying "don't have premarital sex" by being snippy, then you responded to my response with something that I actually agree with but was kind of different than what I was saying, so I felt slightly confused and restated what I was going at to clarify.
I don't think society is pushing "don't have premarital sex" , it obviously isn't. My point is that saying something like "our society should push not having premarital sex" is stupid because it doesn't work. It's basically "Santa Clause for Christmas I'd like a pony" level of policy discussion.
I'm not sure how I would analyze that. Someone in the past might have said that it was similarly stupid to push not smoking. Yet, we did, and major changes occurred. There are all sorts of mechanisms by which a society could push such a thing. Those various mechanisms might have different effects. It's pretty strange to me to lump them all together carelessly. It seems to be actively missing the point to lump them all under "we should simply tell them to not have sex", as if they're all actually equivalent to that. I think it would have been similarly stupid to say that all methods of pushing to reduce smoking are equivalent to "simply telling people to not smoke".
My main point is that it's doubly difficult to analyze how effective various methods could be, given a society that has been pushing for ubiquitous premarital sex for decades. It's just seriously difficult to reason about, and flippant takes like yours are not even really serious attempts at doing so.
EDIT: I will note that my original response was with respect to your statement:
Again, this makes it sound like this is a thing that is actively being pursued. That's sort of the opposite of reality.
It has been actively pursued for decades by a small subset of people (Evangelical Christians) who genuinely believe in it. They were ignored because they were a minority who were unsuccessful in convincing others. Which is rather the point here.
Sorry, I don't get what is rather the point here. Can you spell it out?
Well, the argument seems to be that we should try pushing abstinence (though social pressure and/or government policy) programs. The first hurdle is convincing enough of the public to join you in lobbying for it. Evangelical Christians have tried promoting abstinence since more or less forever, but over time they've largely lost relevance socially and politically. Their failure to gain support is some amount of evidence that that abstinence is truly the unfavored social position.
Abstinence has historically been promoted through shame. And as progressives seem to be currently finding out, the minority can't effectively shame the majority.
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