I’ve seen “Just don’t have sex.” thrown around here a lot and every time except for one the person drops the debate as soon as I ask for the success rate of people maintaining an abstinence only approach.

So here’s hoping someone will actually provide some info to defend the “Just don’t have sex.” stance.

I agree abstinence is the one method that will 100% prevent a pregnancy under normal circumstances and those are the only ones I will be focusing on here.

Does that really matter if the successful employment of this strategy is minimal?

What I mean is this:

Condoms are 98% effective.

Does that percentage matter if the person in question isn’t using the condom? No. It doesn’t.

So what about abstaining from sex? How reliable is that?

According to this study -the fairest one to both sides I could find- it’s difficult to know.

The prevalence of sexual abstinence varied from 0% to 83.6% in men younger than 60 years. The prevalence of primary sexual abstinence was 3.4%–83.3% for young men and 12.5%–15.5% for middle-aged men.

The prevalence of secondary abstinence for young men ranged from 1.3% to 83.6%, while for middle-aged men, it was from 1.2% to 67.7%.

As low 0% to a little over 80% depending on the type of abstinence they looked at and the age group. That is a massive difference in successful employment of this strategy.

Keep in mind some of these results are from actual studies while others are from specific communities which can of course slant the numbers.

A total of 13,154 studies were retrieved, from which data were extracted for 37 population- or community-based studies.

Young men had higher proportions of sexual abstinence than middle-aged men, and age, unavailability of a partner, lower educational levels, low socioeconomic status, conservative and religious conditions, and no or less knowledge about STIs were common predictors of sexual abstinence in most of the men. Although determinants of sexual abstinence were identified, further investigation of biological factors in men younger than 60 years is needed.

Looking at this study and the variations in success associated with different communities, religious groups, age, self esteem, socioeconomic status, behavior of friends and family, including number of parents, etc there are a lot factors that need to be considered.

To achieve a higher success rate you need specific factors. That’s not possible to reliably enforce. We can’t force people into specific religious groups, we can’t just change people’s economic status, we can’t force people to not be single parents.

So given the requirement of such specific factors to achieve a “Just don’t have sex.” solution how do people who keep saying this like it’s the solution expect this to be the the solution outside of these specific situations?

Why is there such a focus on punishing people -because that’s what laws do- when there’s not even a fully reliable 100% solution easily used by everyone?