The document, issued in March by the Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists and supported by UNAIDS and the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, doesn’t go quite so far as to recommend that countries completely decriminalize sexual acts with minors. But it comes close.
“The enforcement of criminal law should reflect the rights and capacity of persons under 18 years of age to make decisions about engaging in consensual sexual conduct and their right to be heard in matters concerning them,” the report reads. “Pursuant to their evolving capacities and progressive autonomy, persons under 18 years of age should participate in decisions affecting them, with due regard to their age, maturity, and best interests.”
But the idea that teens and pre-teens—a group that Western societies have traditionally sought to protect from the consequences of decisions made by their still-developing brains—can suddenly possess the “maturity” to “consent” to sex with often-predatory older people is actually part of a trend. It’s a highly selective trend.
We don’t hear arguments from U.N. agencies and other progressive institutions recommending that youngsters under certain ages be allowed to smoke, drink, drive, marry, or buy guns. But we do hear these very groups pressing for minors to be allowed to choose drastically life-altering, even life-terminating, actions that progressives happen to approve of on ideological grounds.
Ideology, transgender-activist ideology, is almost certainly the driving force behind the nearly uniform consensus in the medical and Democratic-party political establishments (including the Biden administration) that children as young as age 8 who feel uncomfortable with their birth sex can meaningfully consent to puberty blockers and other “gender-affirming medical care,” including the injection of cross-sex hormones for older teens that usually render the recipient permanently infertile.
The situation is similar with “top surgery,” the slicing-off of adolescent female breasts. Disfiguring scars and the inability to breastfeed if the recipient decides later on to have children are among the permanent consequences. Although many states ban mastectomies of the healthy breasts of anyone below age 18, it is fairly routine for 16-year-olds to obtain the surgery if at least one parent consents.
If this sounds like a dubious slippery slope, it should. It all began in the United States during the 1970s, when states began allowing minors to obtain contraceptives without informing their parents. In 1979, the Supreme Court ruled that a pregnant minor could get an abortion without parental consent as long as a court found her to be “mature and fully competent to make this decision independently.”
Since then, many states with liberal abortion laws have given teens access to the procedure without any involvement of parents or courts. Never mind that both contraception and abortion can have medical consequences that it was traditionally thought parents should at least be aware of.
The underlying principle has been “autonomy,” a hazy concept based on a presumed right to sexual enjoyment that for adolescents is deemed to exist on an “evolving” continuum somewhere between puberty and the achievement of legal majority. For decades, progressives have persuaded legislators and judges that imposing bright-line age restrictions on sex-related matters—and now, seemingly, on suicide-related matters—is an arbitrary infringement of human rights.
So we now have the paradox of minors being deemed too immature to marry but mature enough to mutilate their bodies and kill themselves. And soon enough, we may have tomorrow’s paradox: that adult–child sex, once called “pedophilia” and regarded with repulsion, is the new norm because the child in question has somehow “consented.”
