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<DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 28px"><EM>The Spokesman Review</EM>
<H5 class=details style="PADDING-TOP: 5px">December 29, 2008 in City</H5></DIV>
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<H2>Study: Virginity pledges don’t affect behavior</H2>
<DIV class="details nested grid-8"><SPAN>By Rob Stein / Washington Post
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style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 3px">Tags:</SPAN> <SPAN><A
href="http://www.spokesman.com/tags/federal-study">federal study</A></SPAN>
<SPAN><A href="http://www.spokesman.com/tags/virginity">virginity</A></SPAN>
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<P>Teenagers who pledge to remain virgins until marriage are just as likely to
have premarital sex as those who do not promise abstinence and are significantly
less likely to use condoms and other forms of birth control when they do,
according to a study released today.</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>“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.”</P>
<P>The study is the latest in a series that have raised questions about programs
that focus on encouraging abstinence until marriage, including those that
specifically ask students to publicly declare their intention to remain virgins.
The new analysis, however, goes beyond earlier analyses by focusing on teens who
had similar values about sex and other issues before they took a
virginity pledge.</P>
<P>“Previous studies would compare a mixture of apples and oranges,” Rosenbaum
said. “I tried to pull out the apples and compare only the apples to
other apples.”</P>
<P>The findings are reigniting the debate about the effectiveness of
abstinence-focused sexual education just as Congress and the new Obama
administration are about to reconsider the more than $176 million in annual
funding for such programs.</P>
<P>“This study again raises the issue of why the federal government is
continuing to invest in abstinence-only programs,” said Sarah Brown of the
National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. “What have we gained
if we only encourage young people to delay sex until they are older, but then
when they do become sexually active – and most do well before marriage – they
don’t protect themselves or their partners?”</P>
<P>James Wagoner of the advocacy group Advocates for Youth agreed: “The
Democratic Congress needs to get its head out of the sand and get real about sex
education in America.”</P>
<P>Proponents of such programs, however, dismissed the study as flawed and
argued that programs that focus on abstinence go much further than simply asking
youths to make a one-time promise to remain virgins.</P>
<P>“It is remarkable that an author who employs rigorous research methodology
would then compromise those standards by making wild, ideologically tainted and
inaccurate analysis regarding the content of abstinence education programs,”
said Valerie Huber of the National Abstinence Education Association.</P>
<P>Rosenbaum analyzed data collected by the federal government’s National
Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which gathered detailed information
from a representative sample of about 11,000 students in grades seven through 12
in 1995, 1996 and 2001.</P>
<P>Although researchers have analyzed data from that survey before to examine
abstinence education programs, the new study is the first to use a more
stringent method to account for other factors that could influence the teens’
behavior, such as their attitudes about sex before they took
the pledge.</P>
<P>Rosenbaum focused on about 3,400 students who had not had sex or taken a
virginity pledge in 1995. She compared 289 students who were 17 years old on
average in 1996, when they took a virginity pledge, with 645 who did not take a
pledge but were otherwise similar. She based that judgment on about 100
variables, including their attitudes and their parents’ attitudes about sex and
their perception of their friends’ attitudes about sex and
birth control.</P>
<P>“This study came about because somebody who decides to take a virginity
pledge tends to be different from the average American teenager. The pledgers
tend to be more religious. They tend to be more conservative. They tend to be
less positive about sex. There are some striking differences,” Rosenbaum said.
“So comparing pledgers to all non-pledgers doesn’t make a lot
of sense.”</P>
<P>By 2001, Rosenbaum found, 82 percent of those who had taken a pledge had
retracted their promises, and there was no significant difference in the
proportion of students in both groups who had engaged in any type of sexual
activity, including giving or receiving oral sex, vaginal intercourse, the age
at which they first had sex, or their number of sexual partners. More than half
of both groups had engaged in various types of sexual activity, had an average
of about three sexual partners and had had sex for the first time by age 21 even
if they were unmarried.</P>
<P>“It seems that pledgers aren’t really internalizing the pledge,” Rosenbaum
said. “Participating in a program doesn’t appear to be motivating them to change
their behavior. It seems like abstinence has to come from an individual
conviction rather than participating in a program.”</P>
<P>While there was no difference in the rate of sexually transmitted diseases in
the two groups, the percentage of students who reported condom use was about 10
points lower for those who had taken the pledge, and they were about 6
percentage points less likely to use any form of contraception. For example,
about 24 percent of those who had taken a pledge said they always used a condom,
compared with about 34 percent of those who had not.</P>
<P>Rosenbaum attributed the difference to what youths learn about condoms in
abstinence-focused programs.</P>
<P>“There’s been a lot of work that has found that teenagers who take part in
abstinence-only education have more negative views about condoms,” she said.
“They tend not to give accurate information about condoms and
birth control.”</P>
<P>But Huber disputed that charge.</P>
<P>“Abstinence education programs provide accurate information on the level of
protection offered through the typical use of condoms and contraception,” she
said. “Students understand that while condoms may reduce the risk of infection
and/or pregnancy, they do not remove the risk.”
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