HIV Digest	HIV Digest Archive

The majority of teenagers who pledged not to have sex before marriage did not keep their vows, and those teens also developed STDs at about the same rate as young people who had not made such pledges, according to a study at the National STD Prevention Conference in Philadelphia.

Of the 12,000 teenagers included in the study, 88 percent of those who made a virginity pledge reported having had sexual intercourse before they married, Bearman and co-author Hannah Bruckner of Yale University reported. The researchers tested the participants for three common STDs-- chlamydia, trichomoniasis and gonorrhea-- and found the rates were nearly identical for the teens who took pledges and those who did not.

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According to a study researcher, telling young people "to 'just say no,' without understanding risk or how to protect oneself from risk, turns out to create greater risk" of STDs. And those teens who had taken abstinence pledges were less likely to know they had an infection.

Also, the teenagers who had made abstinence pledges were less likely to get tested for STDs. Among the girls, 14 percent of pledgers had been tested, compared with 28 percent of girls who had not pledged. Among the boys, 5.2 percent of pledgers were tested, compared with 9.1 percent of boys who did not pledge. Just 40 percent of teens who had taken pledges reported condom use in the most recent year of the study, compared with 60 percent of teens who did not pledge.

Editor's Note: from the New York Times