MALE-MALE COUPLES AND COMMITMENT: Mark Barton replies to Eve

Eve: I can't accept any argument that rests on the premise that we have "cured" the risk of pregnancy.

Mark B.: I didn't say that we had cured the risk of (unwanted) pregnancy
and (although I wasn't particularly specific) I don't assume that. I did say we had reliable contraception, which we do. To be sure, people don't always apply it reliably, but then they tend to apply abstinence even less reliably. Moreover we have abortion as a safe and effective backup. Thus we have a solution to the problem of unwanted births, which is what I regard as important. If individual women prefer not to use contraception or abortion that's entirely up to them of course. Morally, this then commits them to something like the traditional solution of abstinence/marriage-for-life, but it doesn't commit anybody else.

Eve: Manifestly we haven't. (I doubt we even, really, want to.) According to NIH, about half of all U.S. pregnancies are unplanned.

Mark B.: But in context, this statistic argues my case much more than it does Eve's. The US is one of the worst of the industrialized nations for fertility management, for both teens and older women, and many of the factors that correlate with failure are related to taking a conservative approach more akin to Eve's than mine. For example: "Factors characteristic of the U.S. and listed as significant predictors of high adolescent pregnancy rates were restrictive ideas about teenage sexuality, lack of openness and discussion about contraception and sexual responsibility, high levels of poverty and an unequal distribution of wealth and income, high levels of religiosity, low availability of contraceptive education and family planning services, and high cost of such services."

Eve: Contra Mark's "test-drive the car before you buy her" claim, couples
who cohabited before marriage have higher divorce rates than those who don't. Yes yes I know--correlation is not causation etc etc etc--but that
certainly isn't the picture that Mark's worldview would lead us to expect, is it? [Yale Free Press link]

Mark B.: It's what my worldview might lead one to expect in a world where
there weren't conservative religions that strongly deprecated both cohabitation and divorce. Eve pays lip service to this in her YFP article, but I suggest it's a much stronger effect than she allows. For better or worse, not cohabiting before marriage is relatively rare and curious behaviour, strongly associated with conservative religious views. Therefore, what we see with respect to divorce tells us much more about conservative religion than human nature.
posted by Eve at 3:25 PM VOTE

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