Pledge is No Indicator That Teens Will Abstain from Sex

It seems a pledge made by teens to refrain from having premarital sex is not enough to actually keep them from going through with it. Not only was the pledge not enough for teenagers to refrain from sexual conduct, the group of teenagers who took the virginity pledge were less likely to use a condom or other form of birth control compared to the non-pledge group.

Times have changed in so many ways from when our parents and grandparents were growing up. Many of our elders married as virgins, most before the age of 25. In more recent years, we have begun to hear of more sexually transmitted diseases, possibly because of the growing number of teens having sex before marriage and with multiple partners. Whether it is peer pressure, the fact that less people are attending church and being taught why abstinence is important, there has definitely been a swing in the norm in the last several decades, as far as sex before marriage is concerned.

Janet R. Rosenbaum, a post doctoral student with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, recently wrote a story to be released in the January issue of the journal Pediatrics, based on the same data as some other studies conducted in the 1990’s, in regards to sex among teenagers, but she used a different statistical method. She found that teenagers in the U.S. who pledged to wait until marriage to have sex were no more likely to do so than those teens that didn’t make the pledge. The study involved 289 middle and high-school students, averaging 17 year old, who had taken a virginity pledge during a 1996 U.S. survey of adolescent behavior, and 645 other teens that exuded similar attitudes toward 100 items, including sex and religion. The groups self reported sexual behavior was compared, as well as test results for STD’s and the use of birth control. Rosenbaum said teens that were religious seemed to postpone sexual activity, but she said it had nothing to do with the abstinence pledge or abstinence only sex education programs.

After five years, over 80 percent of the teens who had taken the abstinence pledge denied doing so. Rosenbaum said “This high rate of disaffiliation may imply that nearly all virginity pledgers view pledges as nonbinding.” The percentage of teenagers involved in the research that took part in sexual behavior was 57 percent in the pledge group and 50 percent in the non-pledge group. Even more bothersome to me, was the fact that of those taking part in sexual behavior, only 46 percent who pledged abstinence used birth control and the percentage wasn’t much better with the non-pledge group at 52 percent. The groups on average did wait until later to take part in sexual activity than the U.S. national average according to the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction at Indiana University in Bloomington. The average age of both the pledge and non-pledge groups were 21 and the national average was 17.

Unfortunately, teenager’s sexual activity has increased since 2001 according to the U.S. CDC and the use of condoms has declined slightly, based on a survey of high school students. Teenage pregnancies rose for the first time in 15 years in 2006, according to a report released in July that was gathered and released by 22 U.S. agencies.

Sex in teenagers is a huge issue here in the U.S., whether the issue is with babies having babies, the fact that STD’s are being transferred through our teenage population rapidly or the emotional aspect of giving yourself sexually to someone, at such a young age. Parents, teachers, church communities, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters and friends, we can’t rely on promises of our teens to refrain from sexual activity. We must educate our teens on precautions and responsibilities they have when deciding to venture down the road of sexuality. Many issues would be avoided with abstinence until marriage, but in today’s society, that is no longer the norm, and we must make sure our teenagers realize the consequences and understand the ways to protect themselves.