(CNSNews.com) - A study in the January issue of Pediatrics that is critical of virginity pledges nonetheless reveals that teens who are more religious have their first sexual encounter at the average age of 21, or four years later than teens who are not as religious.
 
The study, using data from the national Adolescent Health Survey, examines 934 teens with strong religious backgrounds, 289 of whom took abstinence pledges and 645 who did not.
 
The author of the study, Janice Rosenbaum, a post doctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told CNSNews.com that her analysis shows that among her sample of 934 teens with strong religious backgrounds, both the pledgers and non-pledgers became sexually active at about 21 on average.  That is four years later than teens who are not as religious.  She said religious beliefs play a role in teens abstaining from sex.
 
“One year before pledging, pledgers are more religious, less sexually experienced, and hold more negative attitudes about sex and birth control than adolescents who do not go on to take a virginity pledge,” Rosenbaum writes in Pediatrics. “Religious adolescents delay sexual initiation, so virginity pledgers’ prepledge religiosity could induce abstinence without the pledge.”

“It is true that this profile of teenagers, these 934 teenagers that I look at are more conservative in their sexual behavior,” Rosenbaum said.
 
Religious teens “are more restrained in the sexual choices and that’s because of their social context,” said Rosenbaum. “They are less sexually experienced to begin with. Their friends are engaging in less risk behavior. Their parents also go to church and they are also choosing to go to church and to stay affiliated with evangelical Christianity.”
 
Nonetheless, Rosenbaum believes her study shows that “abstinence promotion programs” are not a wise policy for the government to advance.  “Adolescents who take virginity pledges are not less sexually active than closely matched adolescents who do not take pledges, but they are less likely to use birth control or condoms,” she said. “Clinicians should provide birth control information to all adolescents, especially abstinence-only sex education participants.”
 
Robert Rector, senior research fellow on domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation, told CNSNews.com that he has conducted several studies based on the same adolescent health survey data used in the Pediatrics study and come to much different conclusions.
 
“It was really quite extraordinary that you find in this survey that kids who took this very brief exposure to virginity pledges have dramatically better life outcomes compared to kids from the same socio-economic background,” said Rector.  This included “dramatically lower rates of teen births, abortion rates down, teen sex down, out of wedlock births down, number of sexual partners down a third to a half compared to kids from a similar socio-economic backgrounds. That’s extraordinary.”
 
Rector argues that most abstinence education programs don’t include a pledge and that what the data shows is that teens who delay sex because of their training and beliefs are at a distinct advantage.
 
“It’s not an abstinence versus non-abstinence message at all,” Rector told CNSNews.com. “It’s very clear that these kids that have what I call pro-abstinence, anti-permissive sex attitudes do substantially better in life. They are much more likely to abstain from sex through high school and teens who have abstained from sex through high school are twice as likely to graduate from college.”
 
But some advocates for so-called comprehensive sex education say that participants in abstinence only programs who have sex usually have unprotected sex because of negative information about contraceptives.
 
“When (virginity) pledgers fell of the wagon, they fell of hard,” Bill Albert, chief program director for The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, said in a U.S. News and World Report story. “What have we gained if we encourage young people only to delay sex until they are older, but when they do become sexually active, they don’t protect themselves or their partners?”
 
“The idea that it has to be either a virginity pledge or encouraging teens to have sex is a false dichotomy,” Albert said. “There is a public consensus in this country to encourage teens to delay sex, but also to provide them with contraception.”
 
Rector said his studies support the importance of continuing federal funding of abstinence education and that Rosenbaum’s study does too.
 
“What she’s really lobbying for is clearly an elimination of abstinence teaching,” Rector said. “And so she’s saying, when you look at these kids that have pro-abstinence attitudes, those pro-abstinence attitudes provide dramatically positive results but they are not linked to the virginity pledge per se, therefore we should do away with those pro-abstinence attitudes.”
 
“Somehow these kids sort of miraculously absorb those messages and values, so we should stop teaching those messages and values,” Rector said, “even though her data shows that all those kids that have those pro-abstinence attitudes do much better in life.”
 
Rosenbaum said she thinks encouraging teens to delay sexual activity is a good public health policy, but that her work shows virginity pledges aren’t the way to reach that goal.
 
“This group, whether or not they are pledgers, are starting to have sex at around 21, which is about four years later than the average American teen,” Rosenbaum told CNSNews.com. “Definitely, though, the social context created by the evangelical context and social groups does seem to cause kids to delay sex. I don’t know what aspect is causing them to do so, but it is not the abstinence pledge.”