WASHINGTON, D.C., August 22, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Parents of teenagers should allow their children to have sex in their home or even live together, according to a recent column in USA Today.
“Letting your teenager have a boyfriend or girlfriend sleep over, or even move in, takes away the ‘sneaking around’ aspect of teenage romance, and that also is a good thing,” wrote columnist Amanda Marcotte, who also writes for the radical feminist blog Jezebel and the pro-abortion blog RH Reality Check.
According to Marcotte, teenage cohabitation is a growing trend. “As youthful cohabitation rises, parents should accept it and educate their children on sex,” she wrote.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report that nearly 10 percent of girls in the U.S. have lived with a boyfriend by age 18. By age 20, the number is more than a quarter.
In the Netherlands, Marcotte says, sex sleepovers are common, with 93 percent of Dutch parents saying they would allow their teenage children to have sex inside their home.
“Although these changes might make some people uncomfortable, the evidence suggests that it's a good thing,” Marcotte wrote. Teenage cohabitation reduces early marriage and fertility rates, allowing young women to focus on their careers.
“Researchers Wendy Manning and Jessica Cohen of Bowling Green State University found that as teenage cohabitation rates rose, teenage marriage rates declined. While it is true that some of the teenage cohabitants gave birth, getting married in your teens is still the surer route to having a baby very young,” she wrote.
Marcotte admits cohabitating teen couples are “more likely to have unstable situations with their family of origin,” but she says even kids from troubled homes can benefit from “using cohabitation the way adults in their 20s do, as a way to save money and spend time with a partner without having to commit to a marriage before they [feel] ready.”
As an example, she held up actress Angelina Jolie, whose mother allowed her daughter’s boyfriend to move in when she was just 14.
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“It was the smartest thing my mother could have done because, this way, we weren't hanging out in a park together,” Jolie told British tabloid The Sun in 2011. “We lived like a married couple for two years. By the time I was 16, I wanted my freedom and wanted to focus on work.”
But not everyone agrees that moving in together is a good solution for hormone-crazed teenage lovers.
Christian Post columnist Jim Denison questioned Marcotte’s conclusions.
“I wondered how Angelina Jolie's early cohabitation worked out for her,” Denison wrote. “Here's what she says of her first sexual relationship: ’I got knives out and had a night where we attacked each other.’ She says she still has scars from the episode, and continued cutting herself until she became a mother.”
Denison added that Jolie went on to have an unhealthy relationship with her second husband, Billy Bob Thornton, followed by a lesbian relationship.
“Her father once said publicly that she had serious mental problems: ‘She's my kid. And if she gets help, I pray that she will be able to know and to feel true love in this life,'” Denison wrote. “She and Brad Pitt have six children, but are not yet married.”
Encouraging parental acceptance of teen premarital sex has been a recurring theme of the pro-abortion movement.
Dr. Amy Schalet, an assistant sociology professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, made a similar plea in a talk sponsored by Planned Parenthood last year. Sexual openness, she claimed, created “a new closeness with [the teen girl's] family.”
Much of Schalet’s work is funded by the Ford Foundation.
“Good parents and morality are stumbling blocks to Planned Parenthood,” Rita Diller, the national director of the American Life League’s Stop Planned Parenthood project, told LifeSiteNews.com at the time. Promoting an “ideal of a ‘sex playhouse’ for teens in the family home is one more manifestation of its tireless quest to promote sex among unmarried youth.”