Teen Abstinence Doesn't Help with STD Rates

And the rate of teen pregnancy among those who go through "abstinence only" ed is far higher...

This is consistent with my anecdotal experience.

Though to be honest, I would not fault abstinence education or make the inference that religious teens are dumb or anything like that. No one ever told me how to use a condom (er...is it really that hard, if you'll forgive my pun?).

The problem was that shame and fear was not enough for most people to say no...but certainly prevented them from presenting a box of condoms for a middle aged man to scan at the drugstore or grocery store. Even in college I knew people who were embarrassed to buy condoms (a public activity) more than they were to violate the moral code they supposedly believed in (though I can understand, that is a private activity...hopefully, anyway.)

I wonder if the age of the pledges was taken into consideration. I noticed growing up that there was strong peer pressure (on the surface) to be part of these abstinent pledge things when you are A) at the youth group meeting on Wed. nights and/or some of your YL friends are in your class, or B) in middle school and the first half of high school. In college there is the added pressure of the meat market of campus christian activities (supposedly for marriage, those energies have to be channeled somewhere).

I'm sure some of my friends here might be horrified to know that I particiated in several abstinence rallies (including one where we stuck little promisory notes in the grass on the Mall in Washington DC) when I was in high school.

Maybe I'm a freak, though, because when I became sexually active I NEVER entertained the thought of not using protection! Abstinence education did not make me stupid, even though I sincerely believed in it at the time. There's got to be more to this story.

-Kitty, mama to Fiona, Thomas, and Dylan.

is it also possible that what one person calls being a "virgin" is not what another calls being a virgin

the reason I say this is because on TV,,ok a date show this guy was professing to be a virgin. In conversation the couple got into talk of a blow job;;;HIS WORD:: ok if his old girl friend gave him "oral sex" is he still a virgin??? In my mind NOOOOO I feel this is very unfair to his dates as if they are a true virgin and want to marry a man who is a TRUE virgin she is being dupped. Notice the guy did not say oral sex as that would give him away as a fake.

ok it does not matter to me a persons personal choice as to whether they are a virgin when they marry. But I do feel we need to be more honest as to WHAT a virgin IS!!

would this not also marr the statistics for such studies????

just a note,, this is not the first time I have heard someone call themselves a virgin after having oral sex.

I wonder if in these studies the people have to disclose just what they have done in their lives,,,would this change things??

I am sure you can get a STD and NOT have to have penetration!!

A few years back when I worked at an AIDS service organization, we were engaged by a local health department to help them figure out why the instance of teen pregnancy was going down but the instance of HIV infection among teens was rising. What we eventually discovered is that kids were having anal sex so that a) they wouldn't get pregnant and b) they could still be "virgins," but they weren't using condoms!!

Danna

For one thing, I would like to know if these teenagers were taught "abstinence-only" or if they were taught abstinence in addition to condoms, etc., but still pledged abstinence for other reasons, such as the ones Kitty suggests.

Also, I don't think that a lowered rate of STDs is necessarily the main goal for proponents of abstinence pledges. The study says that people who made those pledges became sexually active later, had fewer sex partners and married younger; certainly there are "abstinence advocates" who would see that as a good thing in itself. (And I partly agree- I think it would be good for people to become sexually active later than the US average.)

Part of my point in the above comment was that the article did not make it clear (unless it's my own brain that's fuzzy, which is quite possible) whether the study subjects received abstinence-only education, or whether they received a more generalized sex education but chose to pledge abstinence.