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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   32131 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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Those seem like reasonable responses and I'm neither right-wing nor religious.

I feel like I must be missing some context here.

yeah it's a fine method of birth control

It's statistically a mediocre method of birth control. In my opinion, recommending it is somewhat colored by ideological bias (either anti-sex, or anti-western medicine).

I would generally assume the ideological spread most likely to believe this are Christian/right leaning.

I'd simply tell her not to have pre-marital sex

A statistically even worse method of birth control. Recommending this is 100% colored by ideological bias.

Same assumption as above but more certain.

I wouldn't even be mad if she got knocked up

This is just a value judgement, but one I overwhelmingly assume/associate with the Christian/right wing area of human beliefs.

A statistically even worse method of birth control. Recommending this is 100% colored by ideological bias.

You are conflating two things:

  • Not having sex is a 100% effective way of not having children.
  • Telling your kids not to have sex has much lower efficacy, modulo the personality of the kid and the relationship with the parents.

Most of the suggesters likely have confidence in the method (as they should) and in their kids (rightly or wrongly) and therefore suggest this method.

Sure, I agree with this for the most part, although "as they should" is really funny given the proven lack of efficacy in the real world.

I find the distinction somewhat unneeded because I'm only concerned with the actual effectiveness and not semantically splitting it into component parts.

My thesis is that telling your kids not to have sex is demonstrably a bad way of preventing teenage pregnancy, and to think otherwise is to be willfully ignorant, generally due to ideology.

I guess in general, what I'm also trying to say is that just because something is theoretically effective, if it actually isn't effective in practice then who cares. What matters is what real humans do in real life, not what hypothetical outcomes could happen if hypothetical humans did or did not do things (especially when we know the real humans won't act like the hypothetical humans).

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