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This almost makes sense: if we take the formal marriage as the only way of expresing commitment between partners, and given that sex was until recently more or less inevitably leading to pregnancy, limiting sex to married couples is not entirely unreasonable.


Dragi, that is insightful. I had never considered it from that perspective before.

Likewise. This is only the second time I've heard this argument, the last was just a few months ago, during a discussion with a friend I was visiting in Boston.

Of course, it's still wise to remember that no method of birth control, save abstinance or complete removal of body parts, is 100% effective (says the guy that beat the <1% failure rate of an IUD). Not all abstinance is due to puritanical reasoning. Sadly, it's the puritans who seem to push for it the most (to the exclusion of safe-sex education, and the detriment of society), giving it a worse rap than it should have.