Most people reason about right and wrong based on societal (and especially familial) views and positions. A view of sex which condemns or opposes any kind of consensual interaction is oppressive. Such a view contributes to a social environment in which people feel limits on their freedom of consensual sexual interactions because of external negativity (which often generates internal negativity, as well). Social customs and practices are the aggregate of those of individuals, so people can contribute to the existence of an oppressive more without being active, intentional oppressors themselves.

Legal oppression is far from the only kind of oppression. Social norms can be and often are oppressive.



This response entirely misses my point. Arguing from age of consent laws is essentially saying that the age of a person, and nothing else, determines his or her actual (not legal) ability to consent. That's not how it works; age is an estimator of other factors in the brain, which are harder to measure.



Those cases seem to be anomalies of premature puberty. My concern is with biology, not what people will accept today. If we get away from the idea that using birth control is equivalent to standing out on the street corner, it would no longer be objectionable. Make it into a matter of basic health, just like the HPV vaccine.

You say you don't overestimate teen judgment, but then you say that birth control gets rid of a deterrent. If they don't actually weigh pregnancy as a substantive risk, then it's not a deterrent. Also, "it must encourage sex overall, though not necessarily by measurable amounts" is a fine example of an unfalsifiable claim.

See http://www.reproductive-health-journal.com/content/6/1/14:



This makes my point pretty clearly.



Trying to reason from "low probability, serious consequences" can get you to any conclusion if the seriousness of the consequences is not strictly set. Otherwise, you can just arbitrarily increase it to cancel out the lowness of the probability.

The consequences of getting hit by a meteor are pretty serious, but people don't live in bomb shelters. Eventually, it really isn't worth worrying about a low enough probability.



I think I've made it extremely clear that I'm talking about changing social norms, not instituting state mandates.

Raising children with sex-negative views is still oppressive, because those views don't magically vanish once they turn 18.

My German is non-existent, and I will not be back at CERN until the summer; in any case, CERN is in Geneva, which is generally French-speaking (being right at the Swiss-French border).

I ran it through Google Translate, and got this:


The fact that drugs have risks is a reason to do more research and improve the drugs. I am not trying to gloss over or make light of any deaths that did occur, but a few hundred deaths out of tens or hundreds of millions of people is an incredibly low rate already. Aspirin causes more deaths than that.



If all of these "reasonable pro-lifers" exist, what impact do they have? The main "pro-life" movement, comprised of the organizations which dedicate their time to opposing abortion, does not take actions consistent with their stated position, as I have pointed out. This is still a silent majority claim, and one with no supporting evidence that I have seen. Yes, there are undoubtedly individuals who are not motivated in their "pro-life" views by sexually oppressive mores, but their existence has not had any noticeable effect on the movement at large. If they don't actively try to take positive actions and oppose the actions of the current movement, they might as well be a part of it, since the only difference they make is increasing the percentage of "pro-life" people in polls, creating ammunition for the movement.



I referred to medical research, and you responded by talking about the police. I feel no need to dignify that straw man with an actual response.