Sex, Procreation, Recreation, Bonding

The Advi­sory Com­mit­tee for Repro­duc­tive Health Drugs of the U.S. Food and Drug Admin­is­tra­tion voted unan­i­mously recently to rec­om­mend approval of an emer­gency con­tra­cep­tive for use up to five days after sex. Accord­ing to CNN:

The pill is intended for women who have had unpro­tected sex or for whom another method of con­tra­cep­tion, such as a con­dom, failed.

Cur­rently, there are no emer­gency con­tra­cep­tion drugs avail­able in the United States for use more than 72 hours after unpro­tected inter­course or failed contraception.

The panel also advised against requir­ing women to have preg­nancy test­ing before using the product.

Anti-abortion groups have crit­i­cized ellaOne, accus­ing it of being a means of obtain­ing an early abortion.

Con­cerned Women of Amer­ica Pres­i­dent Wendy Wright told the FDA advi­sory panel that ella is an abor­tion pill and that men could use it to exploit women by slip­ping it to their unknow­ing partners.

A group of 20 women’s health orga­ni­za­tions, includ­ing the Amer­i­can Col­lege of Obste­tri­cians and Gyne­col­o­gists, wrote a let­ter to the panel back­ing the drug, cit­ing the roughly 3.1 mil­lion unin­tended preg­nan­cies each year in the U.S.

We are so glad that this med­ica­tion was rec­om­mended in spite of the out­cry by the anti-abortion forces against it. While there are some aspects abor­tion that are dif­fi­cult to accept, at least under some cir­cum­stances, the need for all forms of birth con­trol in the mod­ern world just must be accepted. The same goes for open and hon­est sex edu­ca­tion for our chil­dren. Given the poor state of aware­ness among many adults, per­haps we need bet­ter adult sex edu­ca­tion also. Why, because sex is real and hap­pens but no longer for the sole rea­son of prop­a­gat­ing our species.

How many mil­lions of years has it been since our long-past ances­tors had sex only to have chil­dren? Surely we and Bono­bos (Pan panis­cus) are not the only ones in our fam­ily tree that screw for fun? And why would we, because it is a crit­i­cal part of our inter­per­sonal bonding.

As the world pop­u­la­tion rapidly approaches seven bil­lion of us Homo sapi­ens sapiens-Homo sapi­ens nean­derthalen­sis cross­breeds, and even with unac­cept­ably high child mor­tal­ity rates in many parts of the world, there is lit­tle need for us to cre­ate child after child. There is, how­ever as much rea­son as there has ever been for us to closely bond with each other.

This makes the efforts of activist and reli­gious groups that work so hard to sup­press all forms of abor­tions, or even more unbe­liev­ably, birth con­trol hard to fathom or accept. When the pain and suf­fer­ing cre­ated by the poli­cies of a celi­bate priest­hood within the Catholic Church are con­sid­ered, we have to won­der if the arti­fi­cial lack of sex­ual bond­ing have not cre­ated men­tal pres­sures within the priest­hood that have lead to some many of them per­form­ing such objec­tion­able acts.

It is not that we believe that life should be lead as a wild, open sex­ual exchange where all of us seek mul­ti­ple sex part­ners. Nei­ther is it that we believe that life should be a purely chaste exis­tence with absolutely no sex until mar­riage and that there should be no divorce. There is prob­a­bly is an ideal. It is prob­a­bly is not the same ideal for every­one. It is prob­a­bly rarely met. Also, the less than ideal is not so bad.

There is a time in life when a per­son is devel­op­ing and grow­ing when their emerg­ing per­son­al­ity may well ben­e­fit from mul­ti­ple inter­per­sonal expe­ri­ences. How many or how few sex­ual part­ners is the cor­rect num­ber for a modern-day twenty-something young per­son? There is no cor­rect answer.

But there prob­a­bly is a line where the num­ber becomes too many. There is a point where screw­ing every­thing in sight is purely a recre­ational activ­ity. Can some­one do this for long with­out become hard­ened to the bond­ing that should occur with most sex­ual con­tact? If a per­son uses sex­ual con­tact solely as recre­ational activ­ity for too long, do they lose the abil­ity to really form the bond with another per­son that a truly deep, monog­a­mous sex­ual rela­tion­ship can cre­ate? There are innu­mer­able blogs of peo­ple who pro­fess the won­ders of hun­dreds or even thou­sands of sex part­ners. Hav­ing read a few, our gen­eral impres­sion of most is a small sense of bit­ter­ness toward peo­ple among the writ­ers. We hope we are mis­read­ing the authors, but sus­pect we are not.

And what hap­pens when a rela­tion­ship goes bad? Should some­one stay in a rela­tion­ship just because they made a com­mit­ment, even though things have changed? We have know many peo­ple who have entered into rela­tion­ships with all intent to work to make the rela­tion­ship last. And often the rela­tion­ship has been very suc­cess­ful, for a time. But some­times things change. Some­times it just is not right to con­tinue. One of the most joy­ous wed­ding cel­e­bra­tions we have attended was actu­ally what we call W7. For many rea­sons, it was wed­ding num­ber four for one of the cou­ple and num­ber three for the other. They are both won­der­ful peo­ple. But things had hap­pened in their past rela­tion­ships that just caused the rela­tion­ships to fail. What is won­der­ful is that these two peo­ple can still form a lov­ing, and oh yes sex­ual, bond after all they have been through.

Sex is a part of human life. Those of you that are uncom­fort­able with this fact, we feel sorry for you because you will never be com­fort­able with being human. You need to get over it. Sex is for pro­cre­ation. It is for human bond­ing. And, in the right cir­cum­stances and in the right pro­por­tion, it is even for human recre­ation. It is fun. Enjoy it. And for those of you who just won’t, dammit, stop try­ing to ruin the fun for the rest of us.

Is Still Here & Still Here Too