The traditional moral prohibition against nonmarital sex is designed to spare us (and others) from many troubles, and one of them is a violent or premature death

Cause of Death: Nonmarital Sex

By Guest Column Michael S. Iachetta (Bio and Archives)  Tuesday, June 19, 2012 | Print friendly | Subscribe | Email Us

Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants to ban super-sized soft drinks in New York City, and he may have some grounds for concern: there is at least one recorded instance of a person dying from drinking too much Coke. If the mayor is serious, though, about banning dangerous activities in NYC, he should consider banning sex outside of marriage. This activity is far deadlier than drinking large soft drinks will ever be.

Consider the danger of extramarital affairs. There are plenty of movies on the subject, and two of the more noteworthy ones involve New Yorkers. In Crimes and Misdemeanors, a New York City opthalmologist hires a hit man to murder his mistress after she threatens to tell his wife about their affair. Fatal Attraction depicts the deadly consequences of a New York City attorney’s affair. Yet this danger is far from fictional. In 2007, Devin LaSalle was shot dead while engaging in extramarital activities with Tracy Roberson in a pickup truck outside her home. Roberson’s husband came home unexpectedly and shot LaSalle to death after his wife told him she was being raped. In the same year, 18-year old Sean Powell was shot dead by the husband of his 31-year old lover as the young man sat in a car outside the family’s home. In 2011, a Houston dentist ran over and killed her husband after she learned that he was having an affair. The traditional moral prohibition against adultery, as it turns out, not only protects marriages but also secures the safety of the would-be adulterers and adulteresses of this world.

Extramarital sex can be fatally stressful as well. The family of a married man who died in 2009 during an extramarital “three-way sex romp” was recently awarded $3 million after suing the man’s doctor for failing to warn him that his heart was not healthy enough for this kind of exertion. A recent University of Florence study has shown that men are more likely to die of a heart attack during extramarital sex than during sex with their wives. The researchers suggest a guilty conscience as a possible cause, along with “the stress of satisfying a younger woman” and “the strain of preventing one’s wife from finding out.”

Next come parents who kill or get killed while protecting their unmarried daughters from sexual attention. In some instances, the daughter is involved in a consensual relationship of which the parents do not approve. In 2009, for example, 19-year old Charlie Wilkinson murdered his sixteen-year old girlfriend’s mother and two brothers after the girl’s parents forced them to break up. Terry Caffey, the girl’s father, was shot several times but survived the attack. Two parents from San Francisco were recently charged with murder after allegedly shooting to death their nineteen-year old daughter’s pimp. In other cases, the sexual attention is unwanted, as in the extreme case in which a Texas father recently beat a 47-year old man to death after catching him in the act of sexually molesting his four-year old daughter. Daughters put the lives of their families at risk when they voluntarily engage in nonmarital sex, and men who force themselves on daughters (or serve as their pimps) sometimes also suffer violent deaths.

Consensual sex between adult singles also can turn deadly for those who engage in it. The media have rightly focused on the pure evil of Luke Mangotta, who recently murdered, ate, and sexually abused the corpse of his former lover, Jun Lin. Nevertheless, it appears that Jun Lin voluntarily entered into a relationship with this violent man. In 2011, David Hoem strangled his former lover’s two children in revenge after she reported Hoem for domestic violence and moved out of their apartment. In 2010, University of Virginia student George Huguely V beat to death his “on-again, off-again girlfriend” after finding out that she was in a relationship with a North Carolina lacrosse player. An upstate New York surgeon is currently suspected of shooting to death his ex-girlfriend in the hospital in which they both worked. Of course, this kind of violence does not always end in death. Sometimes the victim survives the attack, as in the recent case of the ex-boyfriend who shot his ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend in the rectum and genitals. Sometimes it only leads to minor assault, as in the recent case of the young man who whipped his girlfriend in the face with wasabi-sauce-covered jeans after she received a text message from someone she slept with in college. Nevertheless, there is abundant evidence that married women are safer than women in nonmarital relationships, and that the violence in nonmarital relationships is more likely to lead to death.

Then there are deaths that result from sexually transmitted diseases. Virgins who marry and remain faithful rarely if ever transmit sexually transmitted diseases to one another. Yet the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases is common among people who have sex outside of marriage. In California, for example, 69.5% of HIV/AIDS cases are transmitted through male to male sexual contact and 7.6% are transmitted through heterosexual contact with someone who has or is known to be at high risk for HIV/AIDS. The human papillomavirus is responsible for almost all cases of cervical cancer, which kills about 4,300 women a year. It also has been linked to “most squamous cell cancers of the vagina and anus; many cancers of the vulva and penis; and, more recently, oropharyngeal cancers.” Oropharyngeal cancers have about a 50 percent mortality rate. The World Health Organization has recently warned against a new antibiotic-resistant strain of gonorrhea, which in extreme cases lead to maternal death. It is almost enough to make you think that Nature is trying to scare us into reserving sex for marriage.

Finally, nonmarital sex sometimes leads to the death of unborn children through abortion. According to Abort73, “approximately 1.21 million abortions took place in the U.S.” in 2008, and in that year “84.3% of all abortions were performed on unmarried women.” A small percentage of these abortions took place because the pregnant woman’s life was in danger, but the vast majority of these abortions were purely optional. In case Mayor Bloomberg is interested, 41% of all pregnancies in New York City end in abortion, and the rate is far higher for teenage girls. As the New York Times notes, “in that age group in 2009, the rate of abortions was strikingly high for blacks (74 percent), followed by whites (66 percent) and Hispanics (53 percent). The rate was also very high for Asians (74 percent), though they were much less likely to become pregnant.” Those who engage in nonmarital sex put themselves in a situation in which it sometimes seems like a good idea to take the lives of their own children, and so a great number of unborn children conceived under these circumstances end up getting killed.

There are other ways in which nonmarital sex can lead to death, but this list should be enough to make the point. The traditional moral prohibition against nonmarital sex is designed to spare us (and others) from many troubles, and one of them is a violent or premature death.

Michael S. Iachetta teaches American Government at Richland College. The opinions here expressed are his and do not represent the views of the college.