by R.A. Scott

Created on: January 08, 2009   Last Updated: April 03, 2010

In a perfect world, we would all love for our children to abstain from premarital sex. The reality is that too many of them end up engaging sexual activity and then have to deal with the results. In their attempt to prevent some of those unwanted results governments, schools and church groups have been spending millions of hours and millions of dollars on abstinence education, but have they really been successful?

The sad truth is that these virginity pledges, while they sound good, as not as effective as its proponents would like. Researchers from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have determined that kids who take virginity pledges are just as likely to engage in premarital sex as those who do not pledge virginity until marriage. The worst part of the whole thing is that those who took the virginity pledges were less likely to use birth control or condoms to help prevent sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).

It seems that those who take these virginity pledges are both conservative and religious. Although they took part in these pledges and whatever ceremonies surrounded them, the pledgers, it seems, did not internalize the pledge. The question then becomes, if these virginity pledged essentially don't change the numbers of young people having sexual relations before marriage why then should the federal government continue to fund these programs to the tune of millions of dollars per year?

The researchers, whose finding appear in the January 2009 edition of Pediatrics, also found that after a 5 year period a whopping 82% of pledgers denied ever having taken the pledge. Although that is a startling number not all of those 82% engaged in premarital sex.

On the other side of the coin is the National Abstinence Education Association. These groups, because of their desire to have teens refrain from having sex before marriage, claim that there are mistakes and errors in that study. Some people look at a yard sale and see junk while others see gold. This is always the way with sex education and abstinence groups.

In an ideal world, and we hardly live in an ideal world, no teens would engage in premarital sex. Teens would not risk pregnancy or stds; worse than that they wouldn't have to risk getting AIDS. STDs can be cured but so far not aids.

Perhaps what is needed is a combination of both strategies. Maybe we should be talking about abstinence while talking about birth control and how to minimize the risk of disease. Talking about birth control does not encourage kids to have sex but what it does do is give information to those who are inclined to have sex anyway.

Resources:

http://www.livescience.com/

http://www.washingtonpost.com

http://www.abstinenceassociation.org

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