What kind of sex education do our children deserve? What kind of education do America’s parents want? If you take at face value a 2004 poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, National Public Radio and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, only “15 percent of Americans believe that schools should teach only about abstinence from sexual intercourse and should not provide information on how to obtain and use condoms and other contraception. A plurality (46 percent) believe that the most appropriate approach is one that might be called "abstinence-plus" -- that while abstinence is best, some teens do not abstain, so schools also should teach about condoms and contraception.” Case closed, right?

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Chapter 19

It’s not hard to see why so few Americans support abstinence education. After all, if abstinence education is “only” about not having sex, why would anyone be in favor of it? Add to that a familiar flood of reports of  “scientific research proving” once again that abstinence education doesn’t work. A January 2009 press release announces a study comparing teens who take a pledge of virginity until marriage with those who don’t and finds that there’s not much difference between pledgers and nonpledgers: most don’t wait until marriage.  Sound familiar?

"Virginity Pledges Don't Stop Teen Sex," blares CBS News. "Virginity pledges don't mean much," adds CNN. "Study questions virginity pledges," says the Chicago Tribune. "Premarital Abstinence Pledges Ineffective, Study Finds," heralds the Washington Post. "Virginity Pledges Fail to Trump Teen Lust in Look at Older Data," reports Bloomberg. And on it goes. It is just one more piece of evidence that teens will be teens, and parents who believe that teens should and could wait, are out-of-touch moralists.

The only problem is, it wasn’t true. As noted by one of the few journalists to look beyond the surface,   “the only way the study's author, Janet Elise Rosenbaum of Johns Hopkins University, could reach such results was by comparing teens who take a virginity pledge with a very small subset of other teens: those who are just as religious and conservative as the pledge-takers.”

Both groups of religiously active teenagers with conservative, married parents waited, on average, until age 21 to have sex, more than 3 years later than the average American teenager, half of whom have had sex by age 17. The real headline from the study could have been “Religious Teens Differ Little in Sexual Behavior Whether or Not They Take a Pledge.” A different researcher might have asked, “What could we learn from these religious teenagers, since half of them were able to delay sex until age 21 and one quarter of them waited until marriage?”