Abstinence shmabstinence

There is an AP story out today that gave me a nice head/desk moment.

Most Americans Have Had Premarital Sex

A new study is out that charts the abstinence rates of people over time. It has some eye opening numbers.

The study, examining how sexual behavior before marriage has changed over time, was based on interviews conducted with more than 38,000 people - about 33,000 of them women - in 1982, 1988, 1995 and 2002 for the federal National Survey of Family Growth. According to Finer's analysis, 99 percent of the respondents had had sex by age 44, and 95 percent had done so before marriage.

Even among a subgroup of those who abstained from sex until at least age 20, four-fifths had had premarital sex by age 44, the study found.

This flies in the face of 'abstinence only' sex-ed advocates. The inference here is that only 4% of people aged 44 had waited until marriage to have sex. What is especially telling is the second paragraph. Those people who waited until at least 20 to have sex, still had sex before marriage in large numbers.

When this study was put before certain federal officials, this was the response:

Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, defended the abstinence-only approach for teenagers.

"One of its values is to help young people delay the onset of sexual activity," he said. "The longer one delays, the fewer lifetime sex partners they have, and the less the risk of contracting a sexually transmitted disease."

Which is true as far as it goes. Having fewer partners does correlate to less risk of Bad Things. However.... other studies have shown that abstinence-only education delays the onset of sexual activity by months on average. Not years. A few months might be a single sexual partner less over a lifetime, but not terribly likely. This is a LOT of federal money being spent for very little gain, federal money that could be put to its stated goal, reduce teen sexual Bad Things, far more effectively if used in other ways.

I'm lucky. When I went through public school sex-ed in the late 80's they actually covered contraception in a way that was meaningful. They did say that nothing is 100% but just not doing it, but they followed that statement with if you need to do it, here is how to do it safely. At the time disease prevention wasn't the #1 priority, as AIDS hadn't penetrated that far into the curriculum yet. These days sex-ed is largely useless, it's the biology of puberty and sexual development, with messages that having sex will ruin your life, and contraceptives don't work as well as you think.

Another interesting part of the study is that they were able to get data on how pre-marital sex rates varied by birth decade.

The study found women virtually as likely as men to engage in premarital sex, even those born decades ago. Among women born between 1950 and 1978, at least 91 percent had had premarital sex by age 30, he said, while among those born in the 1940s, 88 percent had done so by age 44.

Even those born in the 1940's, pre-boomer to early boomer, were doing it in large numbers. These are people who were having pre-marital sex in the 1950's to 1960's. The late 60's may have been a time of sexual liberation, but a lot of that was predicated on the availability of oral contraceptives. As with abortion, oral contraceptives were just plain illegal in many states until a 1972 court decision. The 1950's and 1960's were not an era of general education about sex, you got it from your parents, grudgingly if at all, and figured out the rest on your own. The people who had the most to lose with a pre-marital pregnancy (disease wasn't on the radar then as much as it is now), women, were still engaging in pre-marital sex at the same rate as men.

People born in 1950 and later were around for the sexual liberation movement and more general availability of oral contraceptives. The study author recognizes this, "Finer said the likelihood of Americans having sex before marriage has remained stable since the 1950s." Clearly the spectre of HIV hasn't penetrated our libidos much.

Abstinence-only education is a travesty of public policy. Unfortunately, being a travesty is not a disqualifier for being a public program. We have a long history of funding travesties. Minors need this information, but it is illegal for adults to give it to minors in all but a very few circumstances. With abstinence-only having been ushered in under a Democratic congress, this will not change any time soon, alas.