Pledging abstinence before marriage has been touted as an alternative to birth control. Nice idea if it wat effective. It seems that a recent Johns Hopkins study shows that promise rings and other abstinence pledges just don’t work.

What happens in the real world is that teenagers who pledge to remain virgins until marriage are just as likely to have premarital sex as those who do not promise abstinence and they are significantly less likely to use condoms and other forms of birth control when they do.

“Taking a pledge doesn’t seem to make any difference at all in any sexual behavior,” said Janet E. Rosenbaum of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, whose report appears in the January issue of the journal Pediatrics. “But it does seem to make a difference in condom use and other forms of birth control that is quite striking.”

The fact that teens will have sex is predictable. The fact that the that the pledgers use less birth control is frightening. Think Sarah Palin and her daughter Bristol who became pregnant at 17. This is a result of head in the sand thinking by Palin and the parents of all these kids. Their fantasy world preaching has ill prepared the teens for the real world and its consequence: pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases and single or too young parents with kids that they are not emotionally or financially ready to care for.

The study is the latest in a series of studies that focus on encouraging abstinence until marriage, including those that specifically ask students to publicly declare their intention to remain virgins. Guess what? They all say the same thing. Abstinence doesn’t work as birth control. What’s even worse, in 2004, U.S. Congressman Henry A. Waxman of California released a report that provides several examples of inaccurate information being included in federally funded abstinence-only sex education programs(PDF). According to the report, only 2 of the 13 studied programs didn’t contain major factual errors.

We need to get real about sex education, providing actual education, not religious indoctrination masquerading as sex-ed. I’m not anti-religion. Religion is potentially a powerful positive force, but not when religious wishful thinking substitutes for good science. Thank goodness that our next president actually believes in science and doesn’t take direct instructions from God.

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