Many abstinence programs have embraced the concept of virginity pledges, encouraging children as young as 9 to promise to wait until marriage to have sex.
So how reliable are reports of sexual activity by teenagers who took such a pledge?
Not very, according to a study by Harvard doctoral candidate Janet Rosenbaum published in the June issue of the American Journal of Public Health. Rosenbaum found that 53 percent of adolescents in a large, federally funded study who said they made a virginity pledge denied doing so a year later, often after they had become sexually active.
At the same time, 10 percent of teenagers who said they had had intercourse and then made a pledge or became born-again Christians subsequently said they were virgins.
Rosenbaum's study is based on an analysis of 1995 and 1996 data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which involved more than 13,000 teenagers in grades 7 to 12. At the time, virginity pledge programs, many of them sponsored by evangelical Christian groups, were proliferating as a way to combat teenage sex, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) and perceived moral decay.
Rosenbaum said her study shows that efforts to evaluate such programs is complicated by teenagers' reports of behavior that may be influenced by religious or social factors.
Previous studies have found that teenagers who make pledges contract STDs at nearly the same rate as those who don't, but that they have fewer sexual partners, are less likely to use condoms and more likely to engage in anal or oral sex.
Leslee Unruh, president of the nonprofit National Abstinence Clearinghouse in Sioux Falls, S.D., called Rosenbaum's study ``junk science.''
''These programs work,'' said Unruh, calling the study a ''politically motivated attack'' on pledge programs. ''We see it all the time. I don't trust this data,'' she said, noting that the information that Rosenbaum used was collected 10 years ago. ``Things have changed.'' Did they?
