Study: Virginity pledgers have fewer STDs
Secularists love to claim abstinence doesn’t work. Here is yet another study that proves otherwise.
Refuting an earlier study, the U.S. Heritage Foundation said Wednesday virginity pledgers have lower rates of sexually transmitted diseases.
Using its own studies, the foundation said these pledgers also engage in fewer risky sexual activities. In a virginity pledge, participants take a verbal or written pledge to abstain from sex until marriage.
But a March 2005 article by Professors Peter Bearman and Hanna Bruckner in the Journal of Adolescent Health said that those who took the pledge had the same STD rates non-pledgers.
The foundation’s authors claimed a re-examination found Bearman and Bruckner’s conclusions were inaccurate. They said virginity pledgers who have become sexually active are still less likely to engage in oral or anal sex when compared to sexually active non-pledgers.
They also said Bearman and Bruckner actually found adolescents who made virginity pledges were less likely to have STDs as young adults than were non-pledgers, but concluded that this difference was not statistically significant.
Separately, the New York Times reported independent experts called the new findings provocative but criticized the Heritage team’s analysis as flawed and lacking the statistical evidence to back its conclusions.
Typical.
