STD-Aversion As Primary Reason To Avoid Premarital Sex
This MSNBC article quotes a study that claims more than 9 out of 10 people have had pre-marital sex, even those born as long ago as the 1940′s (contrary to popular opinion that back then everyone was chaste). In other words, pretty much everyone is having sex before they get married.
The study’s author, Lawrence Finer, suggests that these findings “call into question the federal government’s funding of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs for 12- to 29-year-olds.†Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on these programs and he thinks the money would be better spent “provid[ing] young people with the skills and information they need to be safe once they become sexually active.”
Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, defended the abstinence-only approach saying, “One of its values is to help young people delay the onset of sexual activity. The longer one delays, the fewer lifetime sex partners they have, and the less the risk of contracting sexually transmitted disease.†In other words, avoid premarital sex so that you avoid STD’s.
Mormons rarely (or never) give STD-aversion as a reason to avoid premarital sex. I would imagine, however, that most members favor abstinence-only education (more people living the law of chastity is a good thing, right?). But this seems to be a sort of bait-and-switch. We get you to live our morality by scaring you with the prospect of contracting STD’s (kind of like persuading our youth to live the Word of Wisdom with drunk driving horror stories). “That’s not why WE don’t have premarital sex, but you shouldn’t do it because of STD’s.”
I’m torn on this. Less people having premarital sex is a good thing, but I don’t like the idea of imposing my morality on others using fear (of disease) as the motivator.
I don’t favor abstinance-only education. I want abstinance too. I want to make sure that abstinance is covered fairly as the best way to avoid pregnancy & STDs. And by fairly I mean giving it time, as opposed to one liners like, “And of course there is abstinance (rolls eyes) which none of you are actually going to do.”
Comment by JKS — December 20, 2006 @ 7:11 pm
Abstinence-only is a beautiful utopia. But…what happens when individuals actually do have sex?
Comment by Dan — December 20, 2006 @ 7:27 pm
I really have a hard time believing that figure of nine out of ten people having pre-marital sex way back to the 1940s. If it is true, it is a horrible offense to God and procreation. I have a hard time believing it because I know a ton of people who certainly never did it. Normalizing it and acting like it is inevitable or not bad is certainly attractive but does not seem accurate, at least from my personal observations.
Comment by john f. — December 20, 2006 @ 9:01 pm
I do not fall into the crowd of people who mocks the crowd of people who believe people were more chaste in a pre-internet/normalization-of-porn age. But my incredulity not only goes to the stat about the 1940s but also to the here and now. If people have done it, they can of course be forgiven of it, but enough people know it is sin and of the most offensive nature to God that, from my perspective, many people, not just Latter-day Saints but from all religions, are abstaining before marriage.
Comment by john f. — December 20, 2006 @ 9:10 pm
There is something spurious about this survey. 40000 people were surveyed and 33000 were women?
Comment by Matt Witten — December 20, 2006 @ 9:17 pm
HERE’S THE BUSH-SPIN ON THE OUTCOMINGS OF THE STUDY:
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.
[…]
He insisted there was no federal mission against premarital sex among adults.
“Absolutely not,†Horn said. “The Bush administration does not believe the government should be regulating or stigmatizing the behavior of adults.â€
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TWO MONTHS AGO THIS IS WHAT THE BUSH-SPIN SAID:
The federal government’s “no sex without marriage†message isn’t just for kids anymore.
Now the government is targeting unmarried adults up to age 29 as part of its abstinence-only programs, which include millions of dollars in federal money that will be available to the states under revised federal grant guidelines for 2007.
The government says the change is a clarification. But critics say it’s a clear signal of a more directed policy targeting the sexual behavior of adults.
“They’ve stepped over the line of common sense,†said James Wagoner, president of Advocates for Youth, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit that supports sex education. “To be preaching abstinence when 90% of people are having sex is in essence to lose touch with reality. It’s an ideological campaign. It has nothing to do with public health.â€
Abstinence education programs, which have focused on preteens and teens, teach that abstaining from sex is the only effective or acceptable method to prevent pregnancy or disease. They give no instruction on birth control or safe sex.
The National Center for Health Statistics says well over 90% of adults ages 20-29 have had sexual intercourse.
But Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families at the Department of Health and Human Services, said the revision is aimed at 19- to 29-year-olds because more unmarried women in that age group are having children.
Government data released last month show that 998,262 births in 2004 were to unmarried women 19-29, the ages with the most births to unmarried women.
“The message is ‘It’s better to wait until you’re married to bear or father children,’ †Horn said. “The only 100% effective way of getting there is abstinence.â€
The revised guidelines specify that states seeking grants are “to identify groups … most likely to bear children out-of-wedlock, targeting adolescents and/or adults within the 12- through 29-year-old age range.†Previous guidelines didn’t mention targeting of an age group.
“We wanted to remind states they could use these funds not only to target adolescents,†Horn said. “It’s a reminder.â€
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DOES THE ADMINISTRATION THINK WE ARE IDIOTS, OR DID THEY REALLY CHANGE THEIR VIEW?
Comment by anon — December 20, 2006 @ 9:18 pm
The Bible and Book of Mormon are full of situations where the prophets used fear as a motivator. “If you do this bad thing, this other bad thing is going to happen to you.” Therefore, using fear as a motivator should not be dismissed out of hand.
Comment by Bookslinger — December 20, 2006 @ 9:59 pm
Anon, they think we’re stupid. Actually, they are partially right. Americans have an extremely short memory.
Comment by ian Cook — December 21, 2006 @ 12:19 am
I’m in favor of teaching more about what could happen if you have premarital sex. STDs and even more importantly the possibilities of having a child. The strict policy of abstinence-only doesn’t do the youth any good when it comes down to that moment when it may happen. They need to be concerned about their health and the physical consequences.
Don’t get me wrong, abstinence is the preferred route but how many other trials could be avoided by imparting a little wordly wisdom or “street smarts”?
Comment by Jared — December 21, 2006 @ 1:10 am
Do you know a ton of people that didn’t have pre-marital sex in the 40′s, or are people from that time just less likely to speak about it than people are now?
Comment by jjohnsen — December 21, 2006 @ 7:01 am
John, the article qualifies the figures somewhat:
So even according to this study, more people back then were chaste or at least waited longer before becoming unchaste.
Bu whatever the facts are, you’re not alone:
Comment by Peter — December 21, 2006 @ 7:24 am
I think people were just more tight lipped about their sexual activities Anyone who has read Capote, Steinbeck, Williams, and even Shakespeare knows that the sexual climate was freer than we would like to think. More women married, and married younger, but most of them did not wait until the wedding day. In MOST traditions, sex while betrothed is no biggie. It has been that way for millennia.
Comment by Tina — December 21, 2006 @ 7:30 am
And most LDS older singles I know, gay or straight, do not wait for marriage either. There was even a post about that on our very own Bloggernacle, where a popular 40 plus single poster and blogger was, of course not a virgin though never married. I think it was at The Invisible Man blog.
Comment by Tina — December 21, 2006 @ 7:50 am
How many people have to misread a damned statistic before it becomes true?
Finer’s article did not talk about the rate of premarital sex in the 1940′s. It spoke of those born in the 1940′s, who, came of age in the 1960′s, when the so-called sexual revolution began in earnest. Unless, of course, you think that those children born in the 1940′s were having sex in the 1940′s.
Comment by Mark B. — December 21, 2006 @ 9:32 am
Mark,
I think everyone here understood that. But are you suggesting that as a result of the sexual revolution there has been more premarital sex than before?
Comment by Rusty — December 21, 2006 @ 9:46 am
The second sentence in the MSNBC story confuses the birth year/sexually active year issue:
So, it seems, does John F.:
Since sex before the birth control pill was much more likely to result in pregnancy, I suspect that there was less premarital sex then than now. Without the pill to prevent pregancy and widely-available abortion to fix mistakes, and with a strong societal taboo on unwed motherhood, people avoided the risk by changing their behaviors.
The data cited in the study are thin, and suspect.
How about carving out those who had sexual relations with their soon-to-be spouse–whether the wedding was planned before the sex, or afterwards, when the couple (or the girl’s father) decided that they didn’t want Junior to be a bastard? I’d be interested in seeing how this would change the numbers.
Comment by Mark B. — December 21, 2006 @ 10:29 am
I should have completed my comment on the MSNBC story by suggesting that nobody thought that the generation that came of age in the 1960′s was particularly chaste.
Comment by Mark B. — December 21, 2006 @ 10:30 am
The Guttmacher Institute article also takes a huge leap in calling premarital sex “normative behavior.”
It may be customary, it may be ordinary, but that doesn’t mean that the “norm” in society is that people should have sexual relations outside of marriage.
Either he’s pushing for a change more radical than even the Guttmacher Institute would admit to, or he’s as sloppy with his language as he is with his data.
Comment by Mark B. — December 21, 2006 @ 10:50 am
If “it may be ordinary” then doesn’t that by definition make it the “norm”?
Comment by Jared — December 21, 2006 @ 1:24 pm
One of the problems of using something like STDs as a deterent to sex is that if or when STDs are eliminated or protected against, that deterant will no longer work. I would support using STDs as one of the factors in the larger whole of the “free love” movement.
Comment by ian Cook — December 22, 2006 @ 1:31 am
In my view this study hits the nail on the head.
The sexual revolution started in the early to mid 1960′s. So its participants were born in the 1940′s.
The real test is to determine pre-marital sex rates of people born in the 1920′s and 1930′s. They would of come of age in the 1940′s and 1950′s prior to the sexual revolution. Mark B is essentially correct in his comments
I would also probably state that the majority of LDS (this includes inactives and those that marry outside the temple (the real majority) have participated in pre-marital sex. I would argue that the couple who gets married in the temple while both are virgins are a minority and represent an elite subset of the core of the active church.
Comment by bbell — December 22, 2006 @ 1:44 pm
21 Yes the peculiar people. I think that shunning premarital sex is a great way to be elite.
Comment by al_miller — December 23, 2006 @ 12:32 pm
The study is obviously fraudulent or deliberately misrepresented.
I can speak for myself. If approached by someone representing the Guttmacher Institute, I would not participate in such a “study”.
Thus the findings would seem to suggest not necessarily that sexual promiscuity is “normative behavior”, but rather that people inclined to participate in such a “study” tend to be sexually promiscuous.
It is difficult for me to even imagine how the canvassing process alone could avoid strongly selecting for such a response. In fact, that the “study” returns results that exactly conform to the organizational agenda says quite enough for me, right up front.
It seems unsurprising that most such survey-based “studies” tend to return just the kind of findings the sponsor paid for.
Comment by Jim Cobabe — December 23, 2006 @ 3:27 pm