Abstinence Pledges Do Not Work, Teens Still Getting Pregnant
According to a recently released federal study, teenagers who take a pledge of abstinence until marriage are just as likely to engage in premarital sex as their peers who make no such promise, and are also much less likely to engage in protected sex when they do so. Published in Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the study was conducted by researcher Janet E. Rosenbaum of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and surveyed nearly 1,000 high school students.
Unlike previous research, which compared teenagers who took virginity pledges with those who didn’t take such pledges and had no intentions of delaying sexual activity, this 2007 study compared pledge takers with non-pledge takers who nevertheless wished to delay having sex. “This study came about because somebody who decides to take a virginity pledge tends to be different from the average American teenager. The pledgers tend to be more religious. They tend to be more conservative. They tend to be less positive about sex. There are some striking differences,” Rosenbaum explained. “So comparing pledgers to all non-pledgers doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
The results were striking: Rosenbaum discovered that virginity pledges had little effect on the likelihood of pledging teenagers to engage in premarital sex, reporting that “Virginity pledgers and similar non-pledgers don’t differ in the rates of vaginal, oral or anal sex or any other sexual behavior.” Very little difference was found between the two groups, including the number of sexual partners and the age at which the teen lost his or her virginity.
Alarmingly, the most significant difference noted between pledgers and non-pledgers was the likelihood of engaging in protected sex, whether it be through the use of condoms or some other form of birth control. The study demonstrated that pledgers were far less likely to have used any form of birth control in the past year, or in the last time they had sex. “Strikingly, pledgers are less likely than similar nonpledgers to use condoms and also less likely to use any form of birth control,” Rosenbaum said. Pledgers were found to be 10 percent less likely than their peers to use any form of contraception.
Also noteworthy is the fact that pledgers tended to retract their promise of virginity. Results showed that five years after taking the pledge of abstinence, 82 percent of those denied ever having taken the pledge. “It seems that pledgers aren’t really internalizing the pledge,” Rosenbaum concluded. “Participating in a program doesn’t appear to be motivating them to change their behavior. It seems like abstinence has to come from an individual conviction rather than participating in a program.”
According to Rosenbaum, these results suggest that abstinence-only sex education may not be the most effective means of providing teenagers with information about sex and the risks of sexual activity. Researchers found that the government spends roughly $200 million annually on abstinence education, yet that funding may be money ill-spent. “There’s been a lot of work that has found that teenagers who take part in abstinence-only education have more negative views about condoms,” Rosenbaum said. “They tend not to give accurate information about condoms and birth control.”
It is not Abstinence that fails, it is the ability to honor a pledge by the individual that fails. Abstinence is 100% guaranteed to work if employed properly. Humans and the ability to honor commitments, whether it be abstinences, marriage, or law abidance, are pretty much guaranteed to fail.
Researchers found that the government spends roughly $200 million annually on abstinence education, yet that funding may be money ill-spent. “There’s been a lot of work that has found that teenagers who take part in abstinence-only education have more negative views about condoms,” Rosenbaum said. “They tend not to give accurate information about condoms and birth control.”
How much money does the government spend on teaching teenagers how to have sex? Money ill-spent? Wow, that’s funny. Has teenage pregnancy gone down after all the years of teaching teenagers how to use a condom? Exactly how hard is it to teach anyone how to use a condom? How much do “support” Planned Parenthood with in tax dollars? I think the whole point is to reduce unwanted pregnancies, illegitimate births, and to promote waiting to have sex until a teenager has actually found someone they want to spend the rest of their lives with. It’s old-fashoned I know, but that’s the bottom line. I don’t think spending probably 3 to 4 times more on “sex-education” than abstinance has gotten the American teenager in a better spot than without it.