According to the article, Bethesda does not deny that "mature" content was on the disks. From the ESRB:
"When we brought the topless female images to Bethesda Softworks' attention, they confirmed that the art file existed in a fully rendered form in the code on the game disc."
That is to say, the ESRB has been consistent about judging the content within the game itself, not the content added by modders. This is consistent with the stance taken on Grand Theft Auto.
The issue at present is should content on a game disk not accessable by playing the game through normal means be subject to rating. Suppose a "Strawberry Shortcake" PC game had a hard-core porn movie on a subdirectory in the game disk, and suppose that content were not accessable through the course of playing that game. Through a 3rd party tool, in this case a standard movie player, this content can be viewed. Would you slap "E for Everyone" on the box of that game?
Personally, I think it is reasonable to rate games based on all the provided content - the game itself, box art, and any content provided not explicitly part of the game itself.
There is a parasitic wasp that paralyzes and lays a larva on a certain kind of spider. The larva survives by feeding off the fluids of the spider. When it comes time to mature, the larva induces a spider to spin a different kind of web that better supports the wasp cocoon. It then, of course, consumes the spider.
I noticed that you used the term "obvious" several times. It's not to me.
It is not obvious to you that a embryo/fetus/baby is a biological organism? That it is of species "human"? I am making no claims of "personhood" or "self", simply looking at when biological life begins, the kind that would be studied in a cource on developmental biology. Consider this table of contents of a biology textbook. Chapter 7 is titled "Fertilization: Beginning a new organism". Or to the Wikipedia article you cited:
Fertilization (also known as conception, fecundation and syngamy) is fusion of gametes to form a new organism
The inability to provide a universal definition of "life" does not prevent us from recognizing the plain facts of what we know about human pregnancy. By the same measure you would describe a 8 month fetus as a "human organism", so must a 14 day embryo be described.
The bottom line is that there's no obvious definition over what constitutes a living person and what isn't. As someone with a master's degree in biology, I've decided there never is going to be one ("life" will be one of those words like "justice" or "freedom" that mean many things to many people).
There is, however, an obvious biological truth that after conception, a new member of a species now exists. This marks the end of reproduction and the start of gestation for a new organism. This is just the basic biologically reality of things.
What people debate about is not whether a fetus or embryo is "alive" or "human", because it is obviously both. People only debate about the subjective value of such life. Science has closed the door on the debate of when biological life begins, we have even captured it on video. It only remains to debate what is the value of that life.
I would argue that an embryo is precisely an equivalent to someone on life support. Left outside of an uterus there is absolutely no hope that this embryo will sprout into a full blown human
Is this enough to deny human rights? As of today, you are correct - from a few days to 22 weeks or so, the only "life support" that can sustain such a human being is a woman's uterus. But as technology gets better, this requirement will disappear. Today, we can save babies born at 22 weeks - clearly they deserve human rights, even though they are being kept alive with artifical life support. A few years ago, these babies had "no hope" of survival. But surely if they are human beings with rights today, they would have been human beings with rights a few years ago.
IMHO, embryonic stem cell research is even less ethically sticky than organ transplant. If your infant is on life supoport with no hope of surviving, at what point do you pull the plug? Do you agree to give those organs so that some other infant might live?
With stem cell research, you're talking about taking cells from something that hasn't even evolved beyond a tiny ball of cells---far less alive than that infant---and yet most parents would gladly give up that infant's organs so that someone else's child might live, but a surprisingly high number of those same people would not be willing to give up a handful of cells from a frozen embryo so that adults can live.. It's an appalling ethical contradiction.
Embryos are not morally equivalent to people on life support with no hope of recovering - this is why relatively few people of any political persuasion are unwilling to let their unborn embryos be destroyed in a reseach lab. This is the explanation of the "ethicial contradiction". Your view that an embryo is just a "tiny ball of cells" is obviously not shared by many.
Unfortunately, they can't see past the rhetoric to realize that this is a completely different fundamental issue.
No, it is the exact same issue - does an unborn child of any age have a right to life? If one thinks that the answer to this question is "yes", then one must oppose abortion, IVF, stem-cell research, and all activities that destory human life, regardless of whatever useful scientific data may be gathered. Is it ok for scientists to use data gathered by Nazis in human experiments? The question is morally ambiguous at best.
I'm not saying there are no ethical issues. If we see people creating fetuses for the purpose of extracting stem cells, many could legitimately consider that morally and ethically reprehensible---myself included. However, as long as you are extracting tissue from a fetus that is going to die anyway, not taking advantage of those cells would be equally morally and ethically indefensible.
Clearly then you agree that the embryo has some moral status, that creating and killing them is wrong - ok, I agree. But I think your view of the entire issue is a bit too shallow. The ends do not always justify the means, particularly when the "means" is experimentation on and destruction of human beings.
So what is your stance on the destruction of unused embryos at fertility clinics? Why hasn't there been as vocal outcry from Christians regarding that as there has been for stem cells from embryos?
There has been a vocal outcry - google for embryo adoption. It's becoming a bigger and bigger issue because, by and large, couples are unwilling to offer their embryos for destruction in a research lab - I have seen estimates from 5% to 25% of the time. Furthermore, pro-choice advocates oppose federal funding for embryo adoption awareness programs because of the use of the term "adoption" rather than "donation". The outcry is getting louder, but it is not nearly as high as with abortion due to the numbers - up 100-000 400,000 frozen embryos total vs over 1,000,000 abortions per year. But as more and more people become aware of issues with IVF (sometimes up to 30 embryos created at a time), more people will begin to object.
For me, no it is not, because it has no sense of self, memory, the ability to survive without a host attachment or any of the other things that I personally use to define "human life." You are the one that came up with the 14 day thing not me. I have already stated an embryo is a parasitic cell mass. The fact that it may eventually become a human does not make it a human. By your logic my lunch qualifies as a human since some of it's atomic strucure may someday become part of a living human.
I did not ask if it was a human person, I asked if it was a human organism. You have made it abundantly clear that you have no value whatsover for such life, so you do not call it a person. However, you willfully ignore basic scientific truths - after conception, a new biological entity has been formed. Not just a "cell mass", but a new member of the human species. Again, this is Biology 101. You may choose to believe otherwise, but you would just be lying to yourself.
Lastly you almost screwed people that rely on wkipedia, I damn near went and edited the page to definitively prove you wrong. Please next time pick a reliable scientific resource, not some over rated weblog.
You have failed to answer my question, yet again. Is a 14 day human embryo, which happens to have a nervous system, a very young human organism? If not, what is it?
I can already see that a scientific argument, like I was expecting to have, is going to shortly become a moral argument, which I don't have much interest in.
Why have a scientific argument when you reject the basic facts of sexual reproduction? Sure, a clump of cancer cells has some superficial similarities with an unborn person. So does an unborn monkey - that is not the point. You simply resort to this rather tired analogy because you refuse to face biological reality. Go ahead, read about it:
Sexual reproduction is a process of reproduction involving the merging of two gametes from the same species to produce a new organism.
So, do you agree that an embryo is a "new organism", or not? How about a 20 week fetus?
The easiest way to convince yourself that abortion is ok is to dehumanize the unborn child - call it "just a clump of cells", or an aggressive parasite that can be flushed at any time. The biological reality of human development, however, tells a different story. Beyond 14 days (after which there is no possibility of twinning), that embryo is a fully-fledged human organism that will some day develop into a fetus, child, and adult. You can talk about cancer cells all you want, it wont change this basic fact.
Good opinion, but you still didn't explain the difference between mutant cell growth and an embryo. Having worked for a national organization for genomic research (as a software engineer) I have learned a few things, like the fact that even cancer cells contain the same elements that define the cells of a human being, DNA. As a mater of fact they often contian nearly Identical DNA to the human they are host in, probably far closer than that of an embryo (which would be somewhere around 50% different).
I believe I did explain them quite clearly, but just in case I'll explain them again:
A human embryo has a nervous system, a cancer growth does not
"Embryo" is a stage of development that all human beings must pass through. This is not true for cancer cells
Scientists will not conduct research on human embryos, but they will on cancer cells
Cancer cells can be described as "human life" in the generic sense, as it they are metabolically "alive" and from humans. But a group of cancer cells is not a human life, from an ontological perspectice. The bare biological fact is that an embryo (of any species) is an honest-to-goodness creature. Sexual reproduction has completed, and a brand new creature is gestating. This simply isn't the case with cancer cells.
The idea that one cell growth has different rights than another is some what absurd.
An adult is a "cell growth", just as much as an embryo - it is simply more developed. I do not think you would say that it is "absurd" for an adult to have different rights from a cancer cell.
An embryo can not survive with out physical connection to the host.
Well, they can be frozen and survive for many years. What they can't do today is gestate and grow to maturity. But "physical connection" is not a requirment for humanity. Consider conjoined twins that share a vital organ so that separating them would kill them. Are they not people?
I personally am not saying it acceptable to directly kill the cells of an embryo
On what basis do you say this? If an embryo is indeed no different than a clump of cancer cells, then it should be acceptable. Just what are you saying?
but it should be acceptable to the host to remove the growth from their bodies. It's not my fault if the growth can not survive with out direct physical connection to the host body. That is why an embryo or even a fetus is not a Human
You are using circular logic - an embryo is a growth, therefre it is acceptable to remove it, therefore it is not a human. However, an embryo is in fact a distinct biological creature, not a growth, and must therefore be treated differently.
Those are not the only categories. I beleive I explained that there are those that don't beleive life begins untill some point after birth, when conciousness begins. There are those that beleive life and rights begin at different stages of development (like you even said, life might not begin untill 14 days after conception). And there are those like myself who think it's enjoyable to watch extreamists get all bent out of shape when they are confronted with an argument they can't deny as a possibility.
Pay attention to my statement - I am not making any arguments about when life begins right now, only whether the unborn are included in Jefferson's statement "All men are created equal". Again, you don't the unborn have any rights at all. I think they do. That is the only place where we disagree that matters.
Ok so explain to me, I'm not a doctor or scientist, what's the difference between an embryo and a benign growth. An Embryo is not a human being, or else we would call it a human being, but we don't, we call it an embryo.
The difference is quite simple - "embryo" is the name of a stage of development. We often use the name of the developmental stage to identify creatures who happen to be in that stage, for example "an embryo" or "a fetus" or "an infant" or "an adult". Similarly, we would refer to a dog embryo as an "embryo" as well. In this case, we happen to be talking about humans, which makes the discussion about "human" embryos.
At 14 days, we call this young human being an "embryo". This is when the first "primitive streak" of a nervious system appears. It also happens to be when scientists, by international agreement, stop experimenting for the purposes of human stem cell research. Why do they stop? Because it is a human creature, and scientists know this. After all, they have to stop experimenting at some point, else they would be experimenting on children. Do you think scientists are wrong about this? Why or why not?
To not describe an embryo as a "human being" is one of the worst lies you can tell yourself. Biologically speaking, a cancer growth is completely different from an embryo. It does not have differentiated cells, for example. Most importantly, it is not a genetic human being that can develop into a fetus.
You should take a poll and ask people when their life began. I bet you will find very few that say 9 months before they where born. Personally I couldn't perceive life untill many years after I was born, so it could be possible that what we refere to as human life, that which seperates us from mutant cell growth, really doesn't happen untill years after birth.
Are you really suggesting that infant children are not "human life"? That you would have no problem with infanticide as another form of abortion? I don't think you really think this. Self-perception is not a requirement for human rights. If so, I could kill people in their sleep because, at the time of their murder, they would be perceiving nothing.
So lets nto go lumping everyone together as Pro-choice or Pro-life. Cancer cells are alive and there for removing them would not be acceptable by some one who was truely "Pro-life."
People can be lumped into two categories - either the unborn have the same rights as those who are born, or they do not. You clearly do not think that they do, I think that they do. That is the only difference in our position.
How about this for a compelling argument for accepting abortion.
An embryo is an uncontrollable growth not normally existing inside a human body. Cancer is an uncontrollable growth not normally existing inside a human body. We as humans find it completely acceptable to remove a cancerous growth (or even none cancerous cell growth) from the body. If I have the right to remove a mole I don't like then I have the right to remove an embryo I don't like.
Not compelling. A embryo is a genetic human being. You were once an embryo. You were never a clump of cancer cells. An embryo is a stage of human development. It is a human being, which your high-school biology teacher would confirm - human life begins it conception, as is true for all creatures that use sexual reproduction. The only real question is, does a human being have rights while it is still gestating within a woman. The pro-choice crowd says, "Absolutely not (until it is about 22 weeks old)". The pro-life crowd says, "Absolutely. It is logically inconsistent to say humans who are born have rights, and humans that are not born have none".
A blob of cells, which is what most fetus's are when abortions are performed, can't be a victum of anything. Third trimester abortions are a different study, but good luck finding anyone who actually wants those to be performed.
This isn't quite true - see the statistics for yourself. Only 24.7% of abortions in 2001 occured when the fetus was 6 or less weeks old. Can you really look at a seven-week fetus and call that just a "blob of cells"?
Well, yes. In fact, it's high among the poor. Check out Washington D.C. stats, which is the only 'state' that consists of one poor inner-city area.
I agree - this report that links poverty and birth rates comes to the same conclusion.
So at the end of the day, how much does sexual permissiveness at the societal level contribute to teenage pregnancy? Probably not that much either way. I think it is probably safe to say though the open sexual permissive makes it harder (but not impossible) for parents to instill an attitute in their children that it is better to wait before having sex. Parents just need to talk about it early and often with their children.
Fuck off, jesus fucking christ. That's the problem with people like you. You keep bringing up some minor point to frame your major point, but the minor point is WAY OFF BASE.
One thing that really separates the US from Europe is the black population, which has a teenage pregnancy rate of 153.3 per 1,000 - the white non-hispanic rate is 54.7 (according to the AGI link), which is probably most similar to a standard European population. Astoundingly, the black abortion rate of 54.9 is higher than the white non-hispanic pregnancy rate! It is hard to wrap my head around such statistics.
You're right about New York, though. Either they have shitty healthcare or a lot of abortions or, more likely, some combination thereof.
The CDC link has numbers for abortions per 1000 births in the city (723) and state (272) - thats a lot of abortions
And other countries show a lot more nudity on television, at least. I don't think you can measure 'sex' on TV.
To the original question, another poster pointed out that Japan, a county with perhaps the lowest teen birth rate in the world, is *very* sexually repressed. I also think that the US is, in many ways, just as sexually permissive as the rest of the world. Just consider the "free love" movement of the 1960's, or the "The Man Show", or those two mostly-naked women fighting in the fountain in that beer commercial. While there is not explicit nudity, it certainly permeates everything.
One question to get to the bottom of the high US rates is, why are the rates so much higher among blacks? I suspect that there are socio-economic explanations behind it.
People WILL HAVE SEX, you can't get around it, and telling them "abstinence is the only way," all the while beating the Bible is not going to change that
Are you denying that abstinence is the best way to prevent pregnancy? That is all I said. If your goal is to stop teenage pregnancy, I'm afraid that the current problems are so deep that health class isn't really going to change anything.
Japan is even more repressive of sex than the US, and look where it's gotten them in terms of their attitudes towards things like rape and schoolgirl BDSM tentacle fetishes.
The original topic was teenage pregnancy - since Japan has one of the lowest teenage pregnancy rates in the world, it provides a counterexample the the thesis that sexual repression leads to higher rates of teenage pregnancy, as the grandparent was trying to indicate
Um, no. In fact, the link is the other way around. Permissive sexual attitudes reduce teen pregnancy. (And measuring 'illegitimacy' is idiotic. 'illegitimacy' just means 'children born to unmarried parents. It doesn't day anything about anything. For all you know, they all got married the next day, or just lived together for the next 20 years. And the 'legitimate' parents got divorced.)
Teen pregnancy rates, however, have never risen, not since we've been measuring them in 1976.
I'm not sure where you are getting your statistics. See what the CDC says. In 1976, the number of live births per 1000 woman aged 15-19 was 30.1. It peaked in 1994 with 32.4, but then dropped to 24.0 in 2000. However, look at the abortion rate for 15-19 year olds in 2001 - a whopping 17 per 1000. Including non-first pregnancies, there were 366 abortions per 1000 live births (among 15-19 again), meaning there were 43.7 actual pregnancies per 1000 women. This is edging closer to your "5 out of 100" number.
As for your European statistics, correlation does not imply causation. Furthermore, American TV shows plenty of sex on television - MTV, soap operas, the Super Bowl, etc. Do you have anything to support that TV in Switerland is racier than TV here? Or TV in Japan? Here, you can get hardcore pornography delivered to your TV in three clicks. I'm not sure I accept your premise that this country is less "sexually permissive" than Europe.
Which states have the highest teen pregnancy rates? Well, it almost exactly follows the divorce rate. The highest one?
Mississippi, that cesspool of moral filth, at 6.5 per 100. Then Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Arkansaw, all at or above 6 per 100.
I am not sure where your statistics are coming from, but you may find this report interesting. It breaks things down by age and state, and also reports pregnancies next to abortions and births. Your statistics for pregnancy in states like New York are off, but you may have been looking at birth rates. Also, people in states like Mississippi and Texas tend to marry earlier and have children earlier, which explains some of the data.
I am not moralizing, I am simply stating facts. My wife worked in an inner city school, and fatherlessness is a huge problem. It leads to lack of discipline in school, and ultimately an unproductive life. Marriage is simply a stabilizing influence in the lives of children.
Fucking is why we are here, get over it.
Trying to change or hide these pure truths does absoltely NOTHING but cause problems.
This is exactly what modern sex education does - it tries to hide the fundamental fact that sex and procreation and inevitably linked. Somehow, people who say "abstinence is the best way to prevent unintended pregnancy" are derided as being unrealistic - in reality, abstinence is the *only* way to 100% prevent unintended pregnancy, but people can't seem to "get over it" - they'd rather just have sex.
When teenagers have sex they should use contraception. Actually, that's pretty much independent of age. Want babies -> sex w/o contraception. Want no babies -> sex w/ contraception.
Yeah, contraception is not perfect, but I suspect the problem with american teenagers is lack of contraception, not too much sex. (Am european myself and highly doubt americans get more action than we.)
You are assuming a priori that there is nothing wrong with teenagers having sex. This is of course a faulty assumption, since there is no reason for a teenager to be having sex. The reasons to not have sex are many - risk of pregnancy, risk of sexually transmitted diseases, and emotional immaturity. Teenagers are simply not emotionally ready for sex, demonstrated by the plain fact that despite state mandated, rigorous sex ed with lots of information and explicit directions, teenagers continue to get themselves pregnant. The problem with American society is that it is disfunctional. We claim that people are not mature enough to vote until 18, or drink a beer until 21, yet we educate them on how to have sex without (hopefully) having a baby when in high school (13-14).
America, wake up! You should do something about the VIOLENCE, not the SEX! America has FAR MANY PEOPLE KILLED EACH DAY, still organizations seem to care about nudity issues
The link between this culture's openly permissive sexual attitude is clear. Currently, the national illegitimacy rate is over 30%, and black illegitimacy rate over 65% up from 22% in the early sixties. In the meantime was the "sexual revolution" and Roe vs Wade, which increased conceptions by 30% and dropped birth rate by 6%. Just ask anyone who has taught in an inner city school why these kids have so many problems - it is because they don't have fathers. And why don't they have fathers? Because when teenagers have sex, they are in no position to raise their children properly. And why are they having sex? Because in the absence of good parenting, they learn sex about from MTV and Grand Theft Auto. Is complaining about nudity going to fix everything? No its not - but its more of a step in the right direction than just locking up every criminal without addressing the more fundamental problems, which begins by treating sex responsibly - not as an unlockable mini-game.
Slashdot Mirror
Could be to stop piracy as well - full access to the GPU would be the first step to running games copied to the hard drive
Is there any possibility of letting an 'OtherOS' have full access to the GPU, allowing accelerated and 3D graphics for homebrew developers?
There is a parasitic wasp that paralyzes and lays a larva on a certain kind of spider. The larva survives by feeding off the fluids of the spider. When it comes time to mature, the larva induces a spider to spin a different kind of web that better supports the wasp cocoon. It then, of course, consumes the spider.
What people debate about is not whether a fetus or embryo is "alive" or "human", because it is obviously both. People only debate about the subjective value of such life. Science has closed the door on the debate of when biological life begins, we have even captured it on video. It only remains to debate what is the value of that life.
Is this enough to deny human rights? As of today, you are correct - from a few days to 22 weeks or so, the only "life support" that can sustain such a human being is a woman's uterus. But as technology gets better, this requirement will disappear. Today, we can save babies born at 22 weeks - clearly they deserve human rights, even though they are being kept alive with artifical life support. A few years ago, these babies had "no hope" of survival. But surely if they are human beings with rights today, they would have been human beings with rights a few years ago.
Embryos are not morally equivalent to people on life support with no hope of recovering - this is why relatively few people of any political persuasion are unwilling to let their unborn embryos be destroyed in a reseach lab. This is the explanation of the "ethicial contradiction". Your view that an embryo is just a "tiny ball of cells" is obviously not shared by many.
No, it is the exact same issue - does an unborn child of any age have a right to life? If one thinks that the answer to this question is "yes", then one must oppose abortion, IVF, stem-cell research, and all activities that destory human life, regardless of whatever useful scientific data may be gathered. Is it ok for scientists to use data gathered by Nazis in human experiments? The question is morally ambiguous at best. Clearly then you agree that the embryo has some moral status, that creating and killing them is wrong - ok, I agree. But I think your view of the entire issue is a bit too shallow. The ends do not always justify the means, particularly when the "means" is experimentation on and destruction of human beings.I did not ask if it was a human person, I asked if it was a human organism. You have made it abundantly clear that you have no value whatsover for such life, so you do not call it a person. However, you willfully ignore basic scientific truths - after conception, a new biological entity has been formed. Not just a "cell mass", but a new member of the human species. Again, this is Biology 101. You may choose to believe otherwise, but you would just be lying to yourself.
The easiest way to convince yourself that abortion is ok is to dehumanize the unborn child - call it "just a clump of cells", or an aggressive parasite that can be flushed at any time. The biological reality of human development, however, tells a different story. Beyond 14 days (after which there is no possibility of twinning), that embryo is a fully-fledged human organism that will some day develop into a fetus, child, and adult. You can talk about cancer cells all you want, it wont change this basic fact.
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A human embryo has a nervous system, a cancer growth does not
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"Embryo" is a stage of development that all human beings must pass through. This is not true for cancer cells
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Scientists will not conduct research on human embryos, but they will on cancer cells
Cancer cells can be described as "human life" in the generic sense, as it they are metabolically "alive" and from humans. But a group of cancer cells is not a human life, from an ontological perspectice. The bare biological fact is that an embryo (of any species) is an honest-to-goodness creature. Sexual reproduction has completed, and a brand new creature is gestating. This simply isn't the case with cancer cells. An adult is a "cell growth", just as much as an embryo - it is simply more developed. I do not think you would say that it is "absurd" for an adult to have different rights from a cancer cell. Well, they can be frozen and survive for many years. What they can't do today is gestate and grow to maturity. But "physical connection" is not a requirment for humanity. Consider conjoined twins that share a vital organ so that separating them would kill them. Are they not people? On what basis do you say this? If an embryo is indeed no different than a clump of cancer cells, then it should be acceptable. Just what are you saying? You are using circular logic - an embryo is a growth, therefre it is acceptable to remove it, therefore it is not a human. However, an embryo is in fact a distinct biological creature, not a growth, and must therefore be treated differently. Pay attention to my statement - I am not making any arguments about when life begins right now, only whether the unborn are included in Jefferson's statement "All men are created equal". Again, you don't the unborn have any rights at all. I think they do. That is the only place where we disagree that matters.At 14 days, we call this young human being an "embryo". This is when the first "primitive streak" of a nervious system appears. It also happens to be when scientists, by international agreement, stop experimenting for the purposes of human stem cell research. Why do they stop? Because it is a human creature, and scientists know this. After all, they have to stop experimenting at some point, else they would be experimenting on children. Do you think scientists are wrong about this? Why or why not?
To not describe an embryo as a "human being" is one of the worst lies you can tell yourself. Biologically speaking, a cancer growth is completely different from an embryo. It does not have differentiated cells, for example. Most importantly, it is not a genetic human being that can develop into a fetus.
Are you really suggesting that infant children are not "human life"? That you would have no problem with infanticide as another form of abortion? I don't think you really think this. Self-perception is not a requirement for human rights. If so, I could kill people in their sleep because, at the time of their murder, they would be perceiving nothing. People can be lumped into two categories - either the unborn have the same rights as those who are born, or they do not. You clearly do not think that they do, I think that they do. That is the only difference in our position.So at the end of the day, how much does sexual permissiveness at the societal level contribute to teenage pregnancy? Probably not that much either way. I think it is probably safe to say though the open sexual permissive makes it harder (but not impossible) for parents to instill an attitute in their children that it is better to wait before having sex. Parents just need to talk about it early and often with their children.
If I recall correctly, you brought it up:
One thing that really separates the US from Europe is the black population, which has a teenage pregnancy rate of 153.3 per 1,000 - the white non-hispanic rate is 54.7 (according to the AGI link), which is probably most similar to a standard European population. Astoundingly, the black abortion rate of 54.9 is higher than the white non-hispanic pregnancy rate! It is hard to wrap my head around such statistics.
The CDC link has numbers for abortions per 1000 births in the city (723) and state (272) - thats a lot of abortions
To the original question, another poster pointed out that Japan, a county with perhaps the lowest teen birth rate in the world, is *very* sexually repressed. I also think that the US is, in many ways, just as sexually permissive as the rest of the world. Just consider the "free love" movement of the 1960's, or the "The Man Show", or those two mostly-naked women fighting in the fountain in that beer commercial. While there is not explicit nudity, it certainly permeates everything.One question to get to the bottom of the high US rates is, why are the rates so much higher among blacks? I suspect that there are socio-economic explanations behind it.
Are you denying that abstinence is the best way to prevent pregnancy? That is all I said. If your goal is to stop teenage pregnancy, I'm afraid that the current problems are so deep that health class isn't really going to change anything.
As for your European statistics, correlation does not imply causation. Furthermore, American TV shows plenty of sex on television - MTV, soap operas, the Super Bowl, etc. Do you have anything to support that TV in Switerland is racier than TV here? Or TV in Japan? Here, you can get hardcore pornography delivered to your TV in three clicks. I'm not sure I accept your premise that this country is less "sexually permissive" than Europe.
I am not sure where your statistics are coming from, but you may find this report interesting. It breaks things down by age and state, and also reports pregnancies next to abortions and births. Your statistics for pregnancy in states like New York are off, but you may have been looking at birth rates. Also, people in states like Mississippi and Texas tend to marry earlier and have children earlier, which explains some of the data.I am not moralizing, I am simply stating facts. My wife worked in an inner city school, and fatherlessness is a huge problem. It leads to lack of discipline in school, and ultimately an unproductive life. Marriage is simply a stabilizing influence in the lives of children.
This is exactly what modern sex education does - it tries to hide the fundamental fact that sex and procreation and inevitably linked. Somehow, people who say "abstinence is the best way to prevent unintended pregnancy" are derided as being unrealistic - in reality, abstinence is the *only* way to 100% prevent unintended pregnancy, but people can't seem to "get over it" - they'd rather just have sex.
You are assuming a priori that there is nothing wrong with teenagers having sex. This is of course a faulty assumption, since there is no reason for a teenager to be having sex. The reasons to not have sex are many - risk of pregnancy, risk of sexually transmitted diseases, and emotional immaturity. Teenagers are simply not emotionally ready for sex, demonstrated by the plain fact that despite state mandated, rigorous sex ed with lots of information and explicit directions, teenagers continue to get themselves pregnant. The problem with American society is that it is disfunctional. We claim that people are not mature enough to vote until 18, or drink a beer until 21, yet we educate them on how to have sex without (hopefully) having a baby when in high school (13-14).