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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bridge Player who wrote (70143)	6/1/2008 10:03:29 PM
From: Dale Baker	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541008

Here's an STD article - I'll keep looking for pregnancy rates. This alone should be disturbing. Virgin teens 'have same STD rate' Young Americans who pledge to remain virgins until they marry have the same rates of sexually transmitted diseases as those who do not, a new study says. Teenagers who take a public vow to abstain from sex have fewer partners and get married earlier. But they are much less likely to use condoms, the research found. "It's difficult to simultaneously prepare for sex and say you're not going to have sex," the study's author Peter Bearman told the AP news agency. 'Just say no' The research, which is being presented at the National STD Conference in Philadelphia, examined the sex lives of 12,000 adolescents. The data was gathered from young people aged 12 to 18 who were questioned again six years later. According to the study, the STD rates were: * Whites who pledged virginity 2.8% - did not 3.5% * Blacks: pledgers 18.1% - non-pledgers 20.3% * Asians: pledgers 10.5% - non-pledgers 5.6% * Hispanics: pledgers 6.7% - non-pledgers 8.6% The study's authors say that from a statistical point of view, the rates are the same for both groups. "The message is really simple: 'Just say no' may work in the short-term but doesn't work in the long-term," Peter Bearman of Columbia University's Department of Sociology said. Sexual activity Critics of abstinence-only education said the findings showed that adolescents benefit from sex education. "It's a tragedy if we withhold from these kids information about how not to get STDs or not to get pregnant," Dorothy Mann, of the Family Planning Council, told the Associated Press. But promoters of abstinence argue that telling young people about condoms and other forms of contraception increases sexual activity - and as a result increases the rate of teenage pregnancy and the transmission of sexual diseases. US President George W Bush has massively increased funding and support for the US sexual abstinence movement during his term in office. Christian abstinence organisation True Love Waits says it has more than one million card-carrying young members. On 13 February, thousands of American teenagers celebrated a "Day of Purity" to promote sexual abstinence.

To: Bridge Player who wrote (70143)	6/1/2008 10:07:47 PM
From: Dale Baker	Respond to of 541008

Info from Wiki: Studies of virginity pledges There have been numerous peer-reviewed studies of virginity pledges with varying results. Three of the four peer-reviewed virginity pledge studies and the non-peer-reviewed study discussed below use the same federal data, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), in which 13,000 adolescents were interviewed in 1995, 1996, and 2000. The other peer-reviewed study used a study of virginity pledges in California. The first peer-reviewed study of virginity pledgers — by sociologists Peter Bearman and Hannah Brueckner of Columbia and Yale, respectively — found that in the year following their pledge, some virginity pledgers are more likely to delay sex than non-pledgers; when virginity pledgers do have sex, they are less likely to use contraception than non-pledgers.[4] This study found, however, that virginity pledges are only effective in high schools in which about 30% of the students had taken the pledge, meaning that they are not effective as a universal measure. Their analysis was that identity movements work when there is a critical mass of members: too few members, and people don't have each other for social support, and too many members, and people don't feel distinctive for having taken the pledge. This study was criticized for not being able to conclude causality, only correlation, a criticism which applies to all studies of virginity pledges thus far.[5] A second peer-reviewed study, also by Bearman and Brueckner, looked at virginity pledgers five years after their pledge, and found that they have similar proportions of STDs (Sexually Transmitted Disease) and at least as high proportions of anal and oral sex as those who have not made a virginity pledge. They inductively determined that pledgers may substitute oral and anal sex for vaginal sex. Curiously the data for anal sex without vaginal sex reported by males does not reflect this directly.[4] [6] This study also estimated that male pledgers were 4.1 times more likely to remain virgins by age 25 than those who did not pledge (25% vs 6%), and estimated that female pledgers were 3.5 times more likely to remain virgins by age 25 than those who did not pledge (21% vs 6%). The study also noted that those who pledge yet became sexually active reported fewer partners and were not exposed to STD risk for as long as nonpledgers. A third peer-reviewed study — by Melina Bersamin and others at Prevention Research Center, in Berkeley, California — found that adolescents who make an informal promise to themselves not to have sex will delay sex, but adolescents who take a formal virginity pledge do not delay sex.[citation needed] A fourth peer-reviewed study — by Harvard public health researcher Janet Rosenbaum — found that over half of adolescents who took virginity pledges said the following year that they had never taken a pledge.[7] This study showed that those who make the pledge but have sex are likely to deny ever pledging; and many who were sexually active prior to taking the pledge deny their sexual history, which, it is speculated, may cause them to underestimate their risk of having STDs. A 2006 Harvard Journal of Medicine article found that 45% of those girls who signed a virginity pledge engaged in other sex activities such as oral or anal sex.[citation needed] A 2004 report by Robert E. Rector, Kirk A. Johnson, Ph.D., and Jennifer A. Marshall contradicts all the above statistics even though anlysing much of the same data. The reason for the difference can be seen in citation (16) of that report which states [16]"In some cases, individuals failed to answer the pledge question on one or more waves of the survey; an individual who responded negatively to this question on at least one wave and gave no response on the other waves was categorized as a non-pledger." - thus many teens who had broken the pledge but denied making it were counted as NON pledgers, rather than lapsed pledgers.[citation needed]

To: Bridge Player who wrote (70143)	6/1/2008 10:10:24 PM
From: Dale Baker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541008

This may be what we want though I don't see clear data in this excerpt. You could go check the full article if you like: "Abstinence only programs are a case of wishful thinking on the part of it's proponents. According to a 2005 American Academy of Pediatrics study, Abstinence only programs cause an increase in teen pregnancy. Sex ed programs that include contraception information, accurate STD information and Abstinence caused the greatest reduction in teen pregnancy. National Right to Life, without any research to support the claim, insists that providing any sex education other than Abstinence only causes teen pregnancy rates to skyrocket. Here is an article about that American Academy of Pediatrics study: Full Text:COPYRIGHT 2005 American Academy of Family Physicians The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recently published a clinical report on the state of adolescent pregnancy in the United States. "Adolescent Pregnancy: Current Trends and Issues" can be found in the July 2005 issue of Pediatrics and is available online at pediatrics.org. Recently the percentage of adolescents who are sexually active has decreased; however, more than 45 percent of current high school-aged females and 48 percent of high school-aged males report having had sexual intercourse. The average age at first intercourse is 16 years for males and 17 years for females. According to the report, use of contraception by adolescents is increasing, but 50 percent of all adolescent pregnancies occur within six months of first intercourse. In 2003, almost one half of sexually active adolescents reported not using a condom the last time they had intercourse. many adolescents who reported using prescription contraceptives indicated a gap of at least one year between the time that they first had intercourse and the time that they visited a physician to seek a prescription contraceptive. The United States has the highest adolescent birth rate among industrialized nations. Nearly 900,000 U.S. teenagers become pregnant each year, according to the report, and four in 10 women have been pregnant at least once before 20 years of age. Approximately 51 percent of adolescent pregnancies end in live birth, 35 percent in induced abortion, and 14 percent in miscarriage or stillbirth. Twenty-five percent of adolescent births are not first births, and the risk for pregnancy increases after an adolescent has had one infant. Significantly more adolescents who live in poverty become pregnant than do those from higher-income families. The total percentage of adolescents who live in low-income families is 38 percent; however, 83 percent of adolescents who give birth and 61 percent who have abortions are from low-income families. Similar to adolescent mothers, adolescent fathers are more likely than their peers to come from low-income families, have poor academic performance, drop out of school, and have decreased income potential. The report indicates that in 2001, almost 79 percent of all adolescents who gave birth were unmarried, a statistic that has been rising since 1971. more than 90 percent of pregnant patients 15 to 19 years of age said their pregnancies were unplanned. Pregnant patients younger than 17 years have a higher risk of medical complications than do older patients. Compared with adults, adolescents give birth to twice as many low birth weight infants, and the neonatal mortality rate is three times higher. Although still low, the maternal mortality rate is twice as high for adolescents. Adolescent pregnancy is associated with poor maternal weight gain, prematurity, pregnancy-induced hypertension, anemia, sexually transmitted diseases, substance abuse, and poor nutritional intake. Adolescent pregnancy also causes psychosocial problems such as interruption of school, persistent poverty, limited vocational opportunities, separation from the child's father, divorce, and repeat pregnancy. The children of adolescent mothers are at higher risk for developmental delays, academic difficulties, behavior disorders, substance abuse, early sexual activity, depression, and adolescent pregnancy. The AAP reports that the most successful programs to prevent adolescent pregnancy include the promotion of abstinence along with information on and dissemination of contraception, sexuality education, school-completion programs, and job training. Parents, schools, religious institutions, physicians, social and government agencies, and adolescents themselves all should be a part of successful prevention programs. Research shows that discussion of contraception does not increase sexual activity, and programs that promote abstinence along with contraception do not decrease contraceptive use. Thomson Gale Document Number:A138654652