Is it an abuse of state power to stop fourteen year olds starting a family? It’s the same argument but shifted down. I think if you’re going to have a line called ‘adulthood’ - all the things associated with adulthood, drinking, driving, sex, drugs and all the other fun stuff should be at that line.

Otherwise you end up with a mess. Here in the U.K. if two seventeen year olds decide to have sex there’s no legal repercussions at all, they can do as they please- if either of them filmed it, they’d be guilty of creating indecent images of children. If they sent those videos to each other they’d be guilty of distributing child pornography.

To combat the complexity I’d have one age where adulthood kicked in. That’s it. I don’t mind having the age at16, but that also has to be the driving, voting and joining the armed forces age too.