Safe (in What Way) Sex

Warren Throckmorton makes a good point:

In other words, 10th graders, we will tell you that applying condoms may prevent disease and pregnancy but we will not tell you that your long term sexual and emotional satisfaction may be enhanced by saving sex until marriage. The curriculum says in places that the only sure way to prevent disease and pregnancy is through abstaining but there is no mention that one's overall well being might be enhanced by waiting.

Since you won't hear this in school, here are a few survey findings from research concerning abstinence. According to 1996 data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health, lower sexual activity among adolescents is correlated with higher levels of well being. In fact, sexually active girls are over three times as likely to report depressive symptoms than their abstaining counterparts and sexually active boys are over twice as likely to report depressive symptoms. Amazingly, these two groups report higher incidence of suicide attempts; boys in particular are at 8 times the risk for a suicide attempt if they are sexually active.

It's certainly possible that I chose not to absorb the information, but I don't recall ever hearing anything about the emotional benefits of waiting. Of course, the picture becomes less simple upon introduction of such information as this:

Fewer teens are engaging in sexual activity than in the past, and those that do are more likely to use contraceptives, the government said Friday.

The National Center for Health Statistics said that for girls aged 15 to 17 the percentage who had ever had intercourse declined from 38 percent in 1995 to 30 percent in 2002.

For boys, the agency said, the decline was 43 percent to 31 percent.

One plausible suggestion is that Throckmorton and I are insisting on repeating a message that is already getting through, one way or another. Even to the extent that this is the case, though, I'd suggest that the need for more promotion of the benefits of waiting is advisable. The premises for this suggestion derive from two observations from the complete data (PDF).

The first is that it isn't, strictly speaking, true that "fewer teens are engaging in sexual activity"; in 2002, 1,089,000 more teenage girls and 1,101,000 more teenage boys reported having had sex than in 1995. It would be more accurate to say that the number of teenagers who have not had sex increased more than the number who have. That could represent a sexual trend, or it could represent a more general trend.

Which leads to the second observation: the leading reason for abstaining from sex was that sex would be "against religion or morals." (Surprisingly, this reason outstripped the second one, "don't want to get [a female] pregnant," by a greater margin among girls than among boys.) And among females who had experienced intercourse, 5.3% of those who declared religion as "very important" were "cohabiting, engaged, or married," compared with 3.0% who declared it "somewhat important" and a number too low to report who said "not important."

In other words, the data corresponds very neatly with the generally accepted trend of increasing religiosity. It also corresponds with the comparatively high fertility of religious families as opposed to secular families. It's possible (I'd say probable), then, that the improving statistics aren't a function so much of successful sex-ed programs as of cultural shifts. Referring back to Throckmorton's piece, it begins to look as if his advice is most needed by the segment of American society that is least likely to heed it.

Our nation's cultural divide is deepening, and I, for one, have no hesitation about which side I'd prefer my own children to grow up on.