You say: “I am interested in the original question – whether there is any reason to believe birth control has any net positive effects.”

How about: “whether there is any reason to believe no birth control has any net positive effects.”

How would that be honestly answered?

Did you watch the presentation?

Quine-

The Hans Rosling TED talk is admirable in complementing the Gates Foundation strategy. It explains with great clarity why the focus is on child survival rates. Using this metric is surely the way to maximise happiness and well being for all.

“You make the crazy claim that if more people are having sex, then relationships will be “better” because more sex equals more happiness – then when someone points out the flaw in your argument (what makes you think all that increased sex will be between committed couples?)”

I pointed to a paper (which I hope you read) showing that in couples increased sex correlated with increased fidelity. You said something to the effect (and please adjust this if needed the specifics are important) that those prone to infidelity will find more opportunity for infidelity too. I asked for numbers. I suggested that the moral ones were the majority, behaved responsibly, and put their relationship under the (now) needless pressure of abstinence. I further suggested that the immoral minority (the men at least) would behave recklessly under any circumstance. I could further pose the question what are the drivers for men (mostly) seeking sex outside of a relationship?

To be clear I am asking you to consider a computation of net harms by this action of providing excellent (well funded, researched and managed sex ed and contraception). I don’t want to hide from ANY of the incidental harms. My considered opinion on the adultery issue is that in the short term there may be a modest increase springing from currently broken or breaking relationships under dire financial stress and unsustainable family responsibilities. BUT in the longer term this well spring of despair will be stemmed.

Invoking the “sexual revolution” is useful here. Some disastrous mistakes were made in the name of sexual liberation. Key was losing sight of absolute primacy to our need for strong relationships. But some countries got it right pretty quickly. The northern European countries could see the good bits and the bad bits much more clearly than others, and build on it. We can see this in the links I posted earlier on teen pregnancy. (The statistics on abortion show equally the virtues of those countries.)

To get this right takes a sustained cultural commitment over decades. These countries keep getting it right. Mere availability of contraception in an environment where contraception is spuriously denigrated for incidental and trivial reasons will continue to founder and have misery multiply.

And I’m willing to bet that most girls who don’t end up with unwanted pregrancies also have access to contraception. And to education.

When you use a word like “most”, I almost get the impression that you’re interested in the statistics. But you don’t seem to want to be bothered with something as pesky as evidence.

So for every hundred sex acts, it wouldn’t be two pregnancies – it’d be three.

Of course, that doesn’t change the real problem: in the US, most girls who end up with unwanted pregnancies have access to contraception. Yet they end up pregnant anyway.

I would be interested in this argument, if you’d care to summarize it.

Not my red herring. You proposed that adulterers would cause more harm with having increased sex.

Another red herring. You make the crazy claim that if more people are having sex, then relationships will be “better” because more sex equals more happiness – then when someone points out the flaw in your argument (what makes you think all that increased sex will be between committed couples?) you spring up with an, “Aha! PROVE IT!”

I am not interested in proving an irrelevant side claim that has no bearing on anything, except indirectly. I am interested in the original question – whether there is any reason to believe birth control has any net positive effects.

The fact that you have to avoid that argument in favor of distractions suggests to me that my original argument was correct. If there were any net positive effects to be had from birth control, there would be evidence – instead, for every promise made by the pro-birth control crowd, we see that our own society has gotten much worse rather than better in the forty years since birth control became freely available, and such evidence as exists supports the idea that the problems associated with birth control (and “sexual revolution” thinking in general) outweigh any advantages.

“I don’t see why I should bother – smells like (red) herring to me.”

Not my red herring. You proposed that adulterers would cause more harm with having increased sex. You proposed that increased sex due to contraceptive use would yield higher STD rates. (I must point out though that the contraceptive program in mind will include decent sex ed and the urge to always use condoms for STD control.)

I think my hypothesis for behaviours is at least as credible as yours, but if you want to put real evidence on the table as I have sought to do on every occasion here……well….that would be nice.