Kids and Health Care: Abstinence Isn't Reliable
While public health experts are cautious about advocating one sex education strategy over another, the one point they all seem to agree on is that abstinence programs -- in which parents, teachers and other authority figures ask kids to make pledges that they'll avoid sex until they're either adults or married -- aren't reliable.
A 2004 study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, from researchers at Columbia University concluded that adolescents who pledged not to have sex until marriage had about the same rate of STDs as other teens -- and often fail to keep their pledge.
The study of about 15,000 youths aged 12 to 18 found that 88 percent of teens who pledged to remain virgins until marriage ended up having sex before marriage. The study also found that the pledging teens were less likely to use condoms or other "safer-sex" practices when they did have sex. And, because of their ignorance about STDs, "pledgers" were also less likely to seek medical help if they contracted one of the diseases, said the study.
Only 40 percent of male pledgers had used a condom in the past year compared with 59 percent of those who did not promise to avoid sex. Among females, the gap was 47 percent to 55 percent.
The study found that pledging did succeed in delaying sex, reducing the number of partners and led to earlier marriages but it did not reduce the rate of sexually transmitted diseases.
Some parents' groups complained that the Columbia study was designed and executed with the specific goals of discrediting abstinence programs. And they claimed some of the authors had established records of intense criticism of abstinence programs.
