[thecodont]

I suppose one could argue that sex before marriage increases the spread of disease or causes out-of-wedlock pregnancies, both being negative results from a purely secular/non-religious point of view, but one can mitigate those results with birth control and disease prevention.

The spectre of a ruined reputation and loss of self respect, and a desire to avoid being "seduced and abandoned," are also "non-religious" incentives for a woman to avoid sex outside of marriage.

[Sherman Logan]

Sex before marriage doesn’t damage a woman’s reputation today, not in the eyes of most people. It doesn’t seem to harm most women’s self-respect, though they may be lying to themselves about that.

The idea of “seduction and abandonment” is meaningless in today’s world. It refers to a world in which a women was quite literally “ruined” by losing her virginity before marriage. If the man who seduced her abandoned her, nobody else would have her. She was rejected by respectable society and her options for survival became very limited, with prostitution the most common resort.

Few care today about female (or, of course, male) virginity today. Even on this forum Muslims who still do care about it are portrayed as bizarre. A Muslim who wanted his marriage annulled was viewed as antedeluvian, despite the fact that in much of the West this would have been quite unexceptionable not so long ago.