Virginity pledges do little, study shows
Geoffrey Blain
Issue date: 1/6/09 Section: Health
A study from the United States about teens that take an oath not to have sex before marriage suggests that teens that take such pledges are just as likely to have sex as those who don't.
The study, published in the most recent issue of the medical journal Pediatrics, goes on to say that teens that take virginity pledges are more likely not to protect themselves against pregnancy by using a condom or other contraceptive.
Despite these concerning results, the study did find that, on average, teens who take the pledge will delay their first sexual encounter until they're 21, four years later than the American average of 17. The study only looked at teens who were still not married five years after the study.
In the new study, Janet Rosenbaum of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, took all the data that has been stored on teen virginity pledges from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The study asked middle and high school-aged students about their sexual behaviours and opinions, including whether they had chosen to take a virginity pledge, starting in 1995-96.
In the analysis, Rosenbaum compared 289 teens who took virginity pledges with 645 young adults who didn't. Rosenbaum was careful only to analyze teens who had comparable religious views and sexual opinions.
Five years after the initial study the test subjects were aged 20-23. Eighty-two per cent of the test takers denied or forgot that they had ever taken a virginity pledge. Overall, those who took a pledge in their teens and those who did not were no different in terms of premarital sex and their probability of having a sexually transmitted disease.
On average, both groups lost their virginity at the same age, 21, and had the same number of lifetime partners, three.
"There's been some speculation about whether teenagers were substituting oral or anal sex for vaginal sex and I found that wasn't so," says Rosenbaum in her study findings. "But I did uphold a previous finding that they are less likely to use birth control and drastically less likely in fact to use condoms - it's a 10 percentage point difference."
The study, published in the most recent issue of the medical journal Pediatrics, goes on to say that teens that take virginity pledges are more likely not to protect themselves against pregnancy by using a condom or other contraceptive.
Despite these concerning results, the study did find that, on average, teens who take the pledge will delay their first sexual encounter until they're 21, four years later than the American average of 17. The study only looked at teens who were still not married five years after the study.
In the new study, Janet Rosenbaum of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, took all the data that has been stored on teen virginity pledges from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The study asked middle and high school-aged students about their sexual behaviours and opinions, including whether they had chosen to take a virginity pledge, starting in 1995-96.
In the analysis, Rosenbaum compared 289 teens who took virginity pledges with 645 young adults who didn't. Rosenbaum was careful only to analyze teens who had comparable religious views and sexual opinions.
Five years after the initial study the test subjects were aged 20-23. Eighty-two per cent of the test takers denied or forgot that they had ever taken a virginity pledge. Overall, those who took a pledge in their teens and those who did not were no different in terms of premarital sex and their probability of having a sexually transmitted disease.
On average, both groups lost their virginity at the same age, 21, and had the same number of lifetime partners, three.
"There's been some speculation about whether teenagers were substituting oral or anal sex for vaginal sex and I found that wasn't so," says Rosenbaum in her study findings. "But I did uphold a previous finding that they are less likely to use birth control and drastically less likely in fact to use condoms - it's a 10 percentage point difference."
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