American teenagers who take the pledge to remain virgins until they marry have the same rate of sexually transmitted disease (STD) as other young people, a new study on adolescent behavior says.
The finding destroys a key rationale for the abstinence crusade -- that it prevents disease -- and poses a strong challenge to a social engineering project that has been embraced by the White House.
The eight-year study of 12,000 young people by two US sociologists found that the graduates of abstinence programs were as likely as other young people to catch sexually transmitted infections such as gonorrhea or chlamydia.
Other findings, yet to be published, also suggest abstinence programs do not prevent early pregnancy, Hannah Bruckner, a sociologist at Yale University and co-author of the study, said.
That challenges the very underpinnings of a movement that has attracted 2.5 million American teenagers in recent years, and which is endorsed by church organizations and the Christian Right.
Few of those teenagers continue to save themselves for marriage -- 88 percent have sex before they reach the altar. However, the study found they start having sex later.
Even so, Bruckner said she was initially surprised to discover there was virtually no statistical difference in their susceptibility to infection.
That was because such teenagers are less likely to use condoms, and are less aware of sexually transmitted infections, largely because they have been indoctrinated to believe they are not going to have sex.
"Teens who pledge are less likely to get tested for STDs, are less likely to see a doctor if they are worried about STDs and also less likely to know that they have an STD," Bruckner said.
She added that those teenagers, because they were less likely to seek treatment, could also more readily spread sexually transmitted infections to other people.
The study found that STD rates for whites who pledged to stay virgins was 2.8 percent compared to 3.5 percent among other teenagers. Among African-Americans, it was 18.1 percent and 20.3 percent.
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