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.