Commentary:This is both unbearably sad and simply hilarious.
Guess what? Teenagers have lots of hormones and often not the best judgment, but if they want to boink they're going to boink.
If you give a damn about your kids, there are better ways to deal with their emerging sexuality than by making them take a silly pledge so you (and they) can pretend the problem is solved.
If you love your kids, just teach then the facts of life and give them your good advice. Teaching "abstinence" is teaching fairy tales to kids who are far too old for fairy tales.
=H&HH= |
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Teen abstinence pledge fails 88% of time
And 'pledge' teens are less likely to use condoms
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by Jon Hurdle, Reuters News Agency
March 10, 2004
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) -- U.S. adolescents who pledge not to have sex until they are married have about the same rate of sexually transmitted diseases as other teenagers and they often fail to keep their pledge, according to a study released on Tuesday.
The study of a nationally representative sample of about 15,000 youths aged 12 to 18 found that 88 percent of teenagers who pledged to remain virgins until they are married ended up having sex before marriage.
The study, funded largely by the National Institutes of Health, found that these teenagers were also less likely to use condoms when they did have sex because they had not paid attention to sex education.
Because of their ignorance about sexually transmitted diseases, "pledgers" were also less likely to seek medical help if they contracted one of the diseases, according to the study unveiled at a Philadelphia conference on sexually transmitted diseases, or STDs.
ARTICLE CONTINUES 
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Dr. Peter Bearman of Columbia University in New York, who headed the study, said the pledge movement failed to recognize the realities of adolescent sexuality. "Ideological programs designed to make serious interventions in public health programs tend not to work," he said.
Adolescents who pledged abstinence were much less likely than others to use contraceptives the first time they had sex. Consequently, their risk of getting STDs and becoming pregnant was as high as non-pledgers, the study found.
Only 40 percent of male pledgers had used a condom in the past year compared with 59 percent of those who did not promise to avoid sex. Among females, the gap was 47 percent to 55 percent.
The study found that pledging did succeed in delaying sex, reducing the number of partners and led to earlier marriages but it did not reduce the rate of sexually transmitted diseases.
"These movements that are ignorant of social science research defeat the purpose they set out to solve," Bearman said.
Published by
Reuters News Agency
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