"I've mentioned before the 6-year-old in a divorce case who is likely to choose a parent who lets him indulge every whim and sets no rules. I can mention now a 10-year-old girl who decides she wants her clitoris and surrounding tissues cut off. I can mention a 10-year-old who likes free samples of heroin. I can mention a 7-year-old who accepts his parents' religion and thinks it is appropriate if he is severely beaten when the devil makes him disobey his parents. And now I can also mention a girl who likes the idea of her parents prostituting her for extra family income."

You must live in a very strange region of the world to have met these kids.

Tell me, how did these requests turn out in RL?

......................

JK

I know you have never met such children and need to invent them in order to create fantasy hypotheticals from which to derive fantasy ethics.

However...........

Clitoridectomy has never been volunteered for outside of cancer patients. Out here in the real world we understand that girls don't go to safe and sanitary Western style doctors for this; or go on their own at all.

FGM is perhaps a bit too important an issue to those who value the lives of girls for it to be tossed off facetiously for an easy point.

( Though BTW, it was practiced in the West, by doctors and "for the girl's good." This was during the whole "masturbation causes imbicility" craze of the late Victorian. When it was done so, it was precisely BECAUSE the adults and parents claimed that they had her interests at heart. So your scenario OUTSIDE of your fantasies, is always an anti-choice argument in which the child's choice to remain physically intact has "consequences" and "harm" they are too young to foresee. )

In RL you don't see children taking substances which are unavailable in the communities around them. And more often than not it isn't the Mormon kids who want to try something outside their culture ( though this does happen. ) The most frequent scenario is the kid wanting to try the "vice" their parents use. Here the hypocrisy is the primary issue.

Interestingly enough, responsible drinking can be taught in moderation early on. Throughout most of human history water supplies were more likely to kill kids that alcohol or watered-down alcohol. Social scientists note that binge-drinking ( sometimes to death ) correlates with Western cultures who ban underage drinking. Those who moderate underage drinking find that this isn't an issue. But again, I suppose its irrelevant when your limited fantasy analogies better illustrate the pro-choice case.

As for child-prostitution for extra family income? How lovely that you combine two bogeymen; child-labor and child-sexuality. Indeed, some have argued historically that any sexuality outside of traditional marriage would promote prostitution. Once you quit jailing adulterers, who only knows whether money is changing hands when folks meet at clandestine locations? ( Of course the ONLY sexual agent within traditional marriage was the hetero male. )

THAT child prostitution exists in the West, it is almost solely created by banning ALL forms of child labor. Its because no teenage runaway could get hired elsewhere without her employers needing the papers she knows would get her returned to what she ran away from. But in a nice bit of irony, its the constant shouting of "child prostitution" which is used to chill any reasonable call for youth-empowering alternates in the form of other sorts of employment.

And, of course, by keeping all this illegal, it means that these kids are easy prey for folks who can steal from them with impunity. Who are they going to go to? The Cops?

Legalizing prostitution makes it safer for all; as they found in New Zealand.

Legalizing child labor means that runaways don't have to live of illegal proceeds.

Legalizing both means that the kids who changes their mind and decides to go to the authorities needs not fear being charged with a crime. The fool thinks that they can eliminate child-prostitution by criminalizing it. The wiser party just wants to deincentivize the coercive forces that tend to surround it.

Maybe where you live, most Women view prostitution as a way of supplementing the family income. Maybe with so many housewives doing this, the kids wonder, "Why not me?"

But again, I seriously doubt that you believe these tales you spin ever occur in reality. If I am wrong, I would love to see the sources you can cite?

But meanwhile, all these sordid examples you choose for shock-value have RL counterparts. And in reality its the lack of a child's agency which creates the harms you denounce; despite your belief that these could only come about through a child's agency,

Dante