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NUDITY AND HEALTH
STUDY FINDS PREMARITAL SEX IS THE NORM
12/19/2006, New York – USA Today reported today that almost all Americans have had
premarital sex. The report published Tuesday analyzed federal data over time, and it concludes
programs focusing on sexual abstinence until marriage may be unrealistic. "The reality of the
situation is that most people had premarital sex, and it's been that way for several decades," says
Lawrence Finer, director of domestic research at the Guttmacher Institute, a New York Citybased
non-profit organization that studies reproductive and sexual health.
The study, which used statistics from the 1982, 1988, 1995 and 2002 National Survey of Family
Growth, asked about 40,000 people ages 15-44 about their sexual behavior and traced the trends
in premarital sex back to the 1950s.
Of those interviewed in 2002, 95% reported they had had premarital sex; 93% said they did so by age 30. Among women born in the 1940s, nearly nine in ten did. At the same time, people are waiting longer to marry; 2005 data show median age at first marriage is just over 25 for women and 27 for men. The study may fuel the debate over efforts by the federal government
and others to fund programs that encourage abstinence until marriage. Such programs stress that abstaining from sex is the only effective or acceptable way to prevent pregnancy or disease.
"This is reality-check research," said the study's author, Lawrence Finer. "Premarital sex is
normal behavior for the vast majority of Americans, and has been for decades." We are sexual
creatures, and marriage has little or nothing to do with it.”
Finer says the data suggest that abstinence programs face an "extremely high hurdle. … Is it
really feasible to make it normative behavior to have everyone wait until they're married to have
sex?" He said the margin of error is less than one percentage point.
Steve Conley, a sex therapist and executive director of the 2,000-member American Association
of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists in Ashland, Va., says he's not surprised by the
data. "It fits with other trends we've been seeing," he says.
This fall, the federal government clarified its guidelines for millions of dollars in 2007 federal
money available to the states for abstinence-only programs. The message that such funds, which
previously have focused on preteens and teens, would now also target unmarried adults up to age
29 because more unmarried women in that age group are having children.
The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C., that supports
abstinence-only legislation, blasts the report as "an attack on abstinence."
Meanwhile, the International Herald Tribune reported that Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan,
who is preparing a study on condoms for Pope Benedict XVI, says the main weapon in fighting
HIV and AIDS fight must be chastity. Barragan, reiterating Church teachings, said individuals
must "have the courage to clearly proclaim chastity" in a society in which sex is part of the
pursuit of pleasure.
The Roman Catholic Church opposes the use of condoms as part of its overall teaching against
contraception. It advocates sexual abstinence and sexual faithfulness between husband and wife
as the best ways to combat the spread of HIV.
Another member of the Vatican study group, Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo of Mexico, stated
that condoms may help spread AIDS through “a false sense of security.”
Yet another sign that abstinence may be hard to maintain for the human species comes from
Boston, where a recent study on adolescents who sign a "virginity pledge" and then go on to have
premarital sex are likely to disavow having signed such a pledge a year later.
According to an analysis of survey data by Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), researcher
Janet Rosenbaum published an article in the American Journal of Public Health's June 2006 issue
that adolescents who have had premarital sex and then decide to make a virginity pledge are
likely to misreport their earlier sexual history. Rosenbaum, a doctoral student in health policy at
HSPH, examined data from 13,568 adolescents for two successive years and found 52 percent of
adolescents who took virginity pledges or who later became born-again Christians were more
likely to repudiate their earlier reports of having been sexually active. Of teens who reported a
sexual experience at the first survey, 73 percent of those who later took a virginity pledge
retracted their statements of ever having had a sexual experience before taking the pledge. On
average the retractors had more than two sexual partners.
The author concludes that adolescents' self-reported history of sexual intercourse is an unreliable
measure for studies of the effectiveness of virginity pledges. Moreover, the research suggests that
teens’ pervasive recanting of sex makes general research on teen sexuality of particular difficulty.
Most worrisome, Rosenbaum also concluded that the teens who no longer acknowledge their
sexually active past also consistently underestimated the risk of sexually transmitted disease
(STD) risk stemming from their pre-pledge sexual behavior.