from the BIG FOOKIN' SURPRISE DEPARTMENT: "Study Finds That Teenage Virginity Pledges Are Rarely Kept"

Study Finds That Teenage Virginity Pledges Are Rarely Kept
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN

Published: March 10, 2004

HILADELPHIA, March 9 — Among teenagers who pledged not to have sex before marriage, a majority did not live up to their vows, according to a national study reported here on Tuesday. The teenagers also developed sexually transmitted diseases at about the same rate as adolescents who had not made such pledges.

But a pledge to refrain from premarital sex, the researchers found, did tend to delay the start of sexual intercourse by 18 months. The adolescents who took virginity pledges also married earlier and had fewer sexual partners than the other teenagers surveyed, said Dr. Peter Bearman, the chairman of the sociology department at Columbia University and the lead author of the study.

Of the 12,000 teenagers included in the federal study, 88 percent of those who pledged chastity reported having had sexual intercourse before they married, Dr. Bearman said at a scientific meeting in Philadelphia on preventing sexually transmitted diseases.

The researchers tested the participants for three common sexually transmitted infections — chlamydia, gonorrhea and trichomoniasis — and found that the rates were almost identical for the teenagers who took pledges and those who did not.

Yet the teenagers who had taken pledges were less likely to know they had an infection, raising the risk of their transmitting it to other people, said Dr. Bearman and Hannah Brückner of Yale University, the other author of the report.

Dr. Bearman said that telling teenagers "to `just say no,' without understanding risk or how to protect oneself from risk, turns out to create greater risk" of sexually transmitted diseases....