Abstinence research - 12/20/06

Wed Dec 20 12:06:50 EST 2006

- PREMARITAL SEX COMMON FOR DECADES, STUDY FINDS
- WAIT UNTIL MARRIAGE? 'EXTREMELY CHALLENGING'

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- PREMARITAL SEX COMMON FOR DECADES, STUDY FINDS
By Sharon Jayson
USA TODAY 
December 20, 2006

Almost all Americans have premarital sex, says a report published Tuesday
that analyzes federal data over time and suggests 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 City-based
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 10
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.

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 says the margin of
error is less than one percentage point.

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
stirred controversy after Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and
families at the Department of Health and Human Services, explained that the
revision was aimed at making sure states knew money would be available for
19- to 29-year-olds because more unmarried women in that age group are
having children.

Horn was unavailable for comment Tuesday.

But a fellow in family and culture issues at 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."

Heritage fellow Pat Fagan says releasing the study late in the year is "part
of a major congressional battle about to start in January and February to
get rid of abstinence funding."

Finer says he had no control over when the study was published. It appears
in the January/February 2007 issue of Public Health Reports, a bi-monthly,
peer-reviewed journal of the U.S. Public Health Service, and also was posted
on the Internet on Tuesday.

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.

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-WAIT UNTIL MARRIAGE? 'EXTREMELY CHALLENGING'
Wait Until Marriage? 'Extremely Challenging'
The Washington Post
Wednesday, December 20, 2006; Page A02
Vital Evidence (header)

Everybody is doing it, and has been for quite a while.

That's the conclusion of a study of trends in premarital intercourse over
the past half-century.

A 2002 survey of about 12,500 men and women found that 97 percent of people
who were no longer virgins at age 44 had sexual intercourse for the first
time before they married.

By age 20, only 12 percent of people interviewed had married, but 77 percent
had sex, and 75 percent had sex before marriage. By age 44, 99 percent of
people were no longer virgins, 95 percent reported having had premarital
intercourse, and 85 percent had married at some point.

The high prevalence of people reporting sex before marriage isn't new but
has risen in recent decades, according to the study in the January issue of
Public Health Reports.

For example, 48 percent of women born between 1939 and 1948 reported having
had premarital intercourse by age 20. That jumped to 65 percent for women
born between 1949 and 1958, who came of age in the era of protest and free
love.

Among women born between 1959 and 1968, those reporting premarital sex by
age 20 was 72 percent, and for those born between 1969 and 1978, the figure
was 76 percent. The experience of men in those years isn't known. The
government's National Survey of Family Growth didn't include men until 2002.

Welfare reform enacted during the Clinton administration and numerous
education programs promoted by the Bush administration urge people to be
abstinent until marriage -- a goal that is "extremely challenging," said
Lawrence B. Finer of the Guttmacher Institute, the study's author.

-- David Brown

The accompanying chart is quite dramatic - sorry I have no way to send it.
- diane 

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