Virginity pledges ineffective
Tuesday, April 5th, 2005Abstinence education has been the flagship of the religious right’s push to stamp out non-marital sex. Turns out that the skeptics were right. Having teenagers take a vow of virginity is ineffective at cutting the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) among teens.
But wait. There’s more. The problem with pushing abstinence instead of actually providing sex education, is of course that you end up with ignorant teenagers who can’t make informed decisions about sex. So the teens who took the virginity pledge, while abstaining from vaginal intercourse, were significantly more likely to engage in oral or anal sex. Six times more likely.
Bill Mahr predictably wanted to know, “Where were these pledges when I was in high school?”
