Study: 'Virginity Pledges' Are Ineffective

According to a study released earlier today, teenagers who have taken a "virginity pledge" are still just as likely to engage in premarital sex than those who have not pledged their abstinence. But worse than that, the study found that those same abstinence-swearing teenagers are far less likely to use a form of birth control - condoms, etc - when they do become sexually active.

The new analysis of data from a large federal survey found that more than half of youths became sexually active before marriage regardless of whether they had taken a "virginity pledge," but that the percentage who took precautions against pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases was 10 points lower for pledgers than for non-pledgers.

"Taking a pledge doesn't seem to make any difference at all in any sexual behavior," said Janet E. Rosenbaum of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, whose report appears in the January issue of the journal Pediatrics. "But it does seem to make a difference in condom use and other forms of birth control that is quite striking."

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Comments

[TheBlackCat]

The Right is right about one thing.

Now more than ever is time to cut down on wasteful government spending, on programs that have been proven ineffective.

Abstinence education has been consistently shown to be ineffective.

Any public funding for these programs should be cut.

[DarkWitch]

D.uh.

Wonder how many millions of dollars it took to figure that one out.

[TheBlackCat]

HuffPost's Pick

Holland has legalized prostitution, and a thriving porn and sex industry kept alive in their famed "red light districts.­" Amsterdam is often called the "sex capital of the world"

To mitigate this, they have a blanket policy teach their children about sex and sex education and a fairly young age..Absti­nence education does not exist there outside the home or church setting, and sex ed is mandatory for public school students.

Holland, as a result, has the LOWEST rate of teen pregnancy in the world (this includes aborted pregnancies) and one of the lowest rates of STDs in the world, despite living in arguably the most sexualized society in the world.

Educating your children about sex, not sheltering them and scaring them with religious dogma, is what works, plain and simple. The religious right can continue to shelter their kids all they want, and they will continue to have the highest rates of pregnancies and STDs in America.

[wolfgangmo]

Back in the day I was a pro musician and I can tell you that if you want to get laid, then you need to look to the "religious" girls. They are all about how they are perceived in public but get them behind closed doors and they will rock your world.

Frank Zappa was right about catholic girls.

[dawlishgal]

How do they know? Is this some kind of confessional opinion survey? With my experience with opinion measurement, my guess would be that even more of those who "took the pledge" engaged in premarital sex. Because if they would lie in the pledge, they would lie to the poll taker.

[CrabbyGolightly]

Another Palin enters the world! And teen parents Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston just feed fooder to conspiracy theorists by naming their new wee one Tripp. That's just two letters away from her supposed illegitimate son Trig.

The new couple will pocket $300,000 for the new baby's pics from People magazine.

And in that serendipitious way that news sometimes comes, here's the study that virginity pledges don't work. I wonder what Sarah Palin has to say about the study just days after becoming a grandma?
Crabbygolightly.com!

[bernhart]

you are an a%^hole. The measure of behaviour is not the sexual acts themselves but the end result : the divorce rates, the lonely kids without parents. The knowledge that no matter what parents teach the kids will do as they please. You can not use the "hypocrite" card here, it affects all of us. It probably has affected you. You can make fun of virginity pledges but I have a lot of respect for young people who at least attempt to do the right thing. You, on the other hand, are a dufus., dufus

[taitafalcon]

Purity Pledges... "I do believe in ghosts! I do, I do, I do....." There, that should erase tens of thousands of years of human behavior

[Isla1]

Well, if you swallow the concept of an invisible white male creator then it's possible you'll swallow just about anything.

[TheProverbialMan]

That isn't always a bad thing...

[Horus]

I took your statement in about the dirtiest way possible.

[LeftRight]

That may have been the point.....

[drumz]

Isn't that your position on everything you disagree with?

[AndyDandy]

Great! Now I know what girls I should go after.... the ones with purity pledges!!! lol.

[dawlishgal]

do they have a blue letter "P" on their foreheads?

[trinity]

No, but many do wear the current "all the rage" purity rings on their left ring finger.

[Horus]

News we can USE!

[MrGiggles]

Of course they don;t work. Just look at the statistics amongst Evangelical regions and demographics. The STD and teen pregnancy rates out pace the rest of the country.

[LeftRight]

It follows around the world too. European countries which have a good comprehensive sex-ed program in their schools have a MUCH lower teen pregnancy rate than the USA. In addition they have MUCH lower STD rates, a much higher age of first sexual activity, and a much MUCH higher rate of Birth Control usage!

[virtues]

The article above says "Taking a pledge doesn't seem to make any difference at all in any sexual behavior,"

Well, we must qualify that.. When a person's pledge for virginity is mainly based on his true faith and love for God, then it easier for him to change his/her sexual behavior because he /she will be blessed by God with spiritual graces, which include the strength to fight against temptation, and other graces that will lead a person to strongly have their emotions controlled by them.

[rwt1138]

Bullshit. People who have an imaginary friend with magic powers who grant wishes are just as likely to succumb to temptation as everybody else. Imaginary friends don't make you special, just delusional.

[LeftRight]

While I will grant that some people DO have the kind of faith that you are talking about, it's a TINY percentage of the population. And less than 10% of THOSE are going to be teenagers! The fact of the matter is that ignorance will not solve anything, even when it's tied to a "purity pledge", except for in a VERY tiny number of people!

[mishi]

Well, it's pretty self-fulfilling, right? As in: Those who remain virgins have True Faith, those who don't, don't. Hey, tell it to Ted Haggard.

It's kinda like the airplane-crash BS: "I prayed to God, and he saved me." Implying, of course, that those unlucky passengers who got incinerated were theological slackers.

[WoodrowH]

Yeah, like all of the "unlucky" passengers on this spinning space shipe we live on: You must be saved or perish. your choice.

[DarkWitch]

I'll pit your True Faith against Raging Hormones any day, and lets see how easy it is to change a natural biological function. Evidently you were spawned full grown and don't remember those days.

True faith should not require rejection of one's own body.

[WoodrowH]

Not rejection but correction, or do you think discipline is somthing that should be done away with because of raging hormones. Sadly that's what many people seem to be saying on this board and are demonstrating in the world today. No wonder we are going through a spiritual, moral, and financial crisis as we speak. I'm not shocked, are you? I knew since 1992 what was coming. That's when I was born again.

[Aegis72]

"People who have an imaginary friend with magic powers who grant wishes are just as likely to succumb to temptation as everybody else."

--People who have an imaginary friend with magic powers who grant wishes are MORE likely to succumb to temptation as everybody else.

Fixed that for you :) ."Virtue"'s comments are yet another example of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy so often employed by theists when defending their inane programs that fail to work. It's ridiculous.

[virtues]

Nowadays, it's true that pledges of Virginity are ineffective because our society has become more and more decadent, and the people sad to say, has turned their backs from God's teaching which is to keep their purity and obey God's Word.
No matter how these people changed their moralities, God's teachings will never change, so those impure people and proud to show it off must expect to receive God's wrath in His time..

[Progress08]

So it's OK to own slaves and treat your wife like property? If gawds teachings went unchanged we'd still be stoning women and riding donkeys to the local well. The first 700 years of christianity is a shameful and destructive era. Science flatlined and christians killed or converted. Then we got the wonderment of the mideval times where christians tortured and killed jews for being jewish. God's word is written in blood. Christianity would be great if it weren't for christians.

[AndyDandy]

"keep their purity and obey God's Word"

Keep purity.... I think we should start by not starting wars that kill thousands of innocent ppl, but then again who cares about violence, prejudice, and racism? There are more important things to worry about like telling sexually curious teens to keep it in their pants.... right?

Oh and btw WHAT GOD WORDS??? When I was a teen I never heard GOD tell me not to have sex.... and the last time I checked the Bible was written by Human beings.

[Cach]

Except that there is no god. Never was a god. And never will be a god.

But alas, there will always be a segment of people prone to believe in these medieval myths. You may as well ask the fairies that live in your garden for advice. They are just as real.

[mishi]

You mean the fairies in my garden aren't REAL?

Wow...what a bummer of a way to start the year.

[citizensrus]

What is God? I looked it up, because I didn't know. God is a supernatural Being, for who anything that can't be explained is given the credit or the blame. Once science finds out the explanation, it is no longer a "supernatural" event.

[LeftRight]

Great idea! What about those of us who don't believe in your god? What about those of us who don't believe in ANY god? Why should you have a right to force your beliefs on ANYONE else?? When you can come back with a better argument than "god said so" then we can have a real debate!

[DarkWitch]

So what do you care. Sacrifice your own children's well being to your g.od if you wish, and let the rest of us raise ours without making your false moralities public policy. You have so confused your g.od's teachings with your own personal issues you have lost the ability to open your eyes.

A wise person once said, " We are not human beings trying to be spiritual, we are spiritual beings trying to be human."

Try being more human and see how the world looks then.

[the-lexicon]

I was just noticing that, statistically speaking, 66.6% of the Palin family women who are of menstrual age, have given birth to children out of wedlock in their teens.

I was also noticing that, statistically speaking, 14.0% of the lexicon family women who are of menstrual age have given birth to children out of wedlock in their teens.

According to my math, then, a Palin family woman who received Christian evangelical abstinence training, is FOUR TIMES more likely to become pregnant in her teens out of wedlock than a lexicon family woman, who received pragmatic, reality-based sexual education.

just sayin'....

lexicon

[LeftRight]

Where's the 66.6% coming from? I know about Bristol, but did Sarah?

[loril]

Well, duh. Teens are in the prime of their sexual lives...ho­rmones raging. Just say no will be about as effective as it was with drugs. Those who are cautious will be more prone to wait, with or without a pledge or slogan. Those who are reckless will not, either way..

I wonder why more parents don't just appeal to their teenager's sense of reason. Tell your teen why your family cannot afford to raise another child. Explain to them why the responsibility of raising the baby almost always falls to the grandparents, because the teenager involved has very little work experience, no credit history, no savings, and is still in a position of dependence. Tell them that this is the reason why you want them to be sexually cautious and leave the fire and brimstone out of it.

My dad explained it to me this way. He did not forbid me anything or tell me I would be an evil person if I had sex. He just made it extremely clear to me that I must be in charge of the birth control and this was one precaution I could never afford to skip. It worked. I was selective and my rule was "no contraception, no sex". My boyfriends actually appreciated this approach. They did not want to be given the responsibilities of fatherhood at 19 or 20 either.

This is why it makes me insane when the fundamentalists start making it difficult for teens to get good contraception.

[dawlishgal]

Me too. The birth control issue ought to be part of the whole discussion of both abstinence and abortion. It is hard for me to believe that the fundamentalists will be open to any kind of compromise that requires sex education or advocating of birth control. And their "pledge" thing is just not working. I hope they are prepared to adopt lots of unwanted babies, including the ones with serious mental and physical problems,as well as to advocate funding mental health programs to help the unsupervised and unwanted to grow into reasonably-adjusted and non-violent adults. If God wanted us to bring unwanted babies into the world, he wouldn't have given us birth control.

Two more myths: that there is a good home for every unwanted child, and that as soon as a birth mother sees the baby, she will love it and nurture it.

[dnno1]

If you really want to stop that then you got to figure out a way to neutralize their hormones. Otherwise it is human nature.