# 1  |  Axle  |  2013-01-11
Jo Tamar- As for the not having sex until you're ready to have cilrdhen well, that seems to me to reek of sex is only for the baybeez' logic. I don't believe that but considering that most countries have craptastic access to birth control and abortion (and even if it is available not everyone will use it or use it correctly), many people will get pregnant. I don't think that an acknowledgment that some people will have sex at 13 or 14 (even if that was an official acknowledgment in the form of changes to age of consent laws) is necessarily sending any message that people at that age are ready to have a child. I realize that people will have sex at a young age, but I don't think it's a good thing at all, and not out of a moralizing, finger-wagging perspective.There's the death aspect, for one. People do contract potentially fatal STIs from sex (and even if they aren't fatal, they can cause long-lasting, serious health conditions) and women can die from complications of pregnancy and childbirth. I don't think that younger teenagers have as much understanding as older teenagers about the potential consequences. I'm reading a book about sibling loss and the author wrote that people don't understand loss until late adolescence. If young teenagers don't understand/care how serious STIs can be, then why use protection? We don't trust young teenagers to make other potentially dangerous choices drive, smoke, drink, join the military, etc.STIs are also worse when a young, developing system is infected, and I would assume pregnancy is, too.And from what I wrote about the possibility of a transitional period , we don't have one now. And I'm seriously uncomfortable with considering a 14, 13 or even 10 year old as equivalent to an adult woman, sexually. if it was a general rule that you shouldn't have sex until ready to have cilrdhen, there'd be a lot of people never allowed to have sex! I realize that there are many adults who are horrid parents, but with existing social laws, adults are at least able to work, drive, open credit card accounts, own property and are assumed to have completed education or at least had a shot at it. It just doesn't make sense to me, in a legal/social context, to say that it's ok for someone to do something that can result in a baby, when they have no financial resources to take care of it. But again, I think kids and teenagers are more clued up than we sometimes remember. I'm 20. (I don't know how old you are.) IME, when people became sexually active in middle school (ages 11-14), it was almost always due to social pressures and/or altered states. When people became sexually active in later high school (ages 15-18), some of them did for the same reasons, but most of them did so with someone they trusted (long term boyfriend or girlfriend) and were smart about birth control.