There is an interesting article by Margaret Talbot in this week’s online New Yorker entitled “Red Sex, Blue Sex”, and subtitled “Why do so many evangelical teen-agers become pregnant?”
There are several interesting bullet points here that bear mention:
- 74% of white evangelical teen-agers say that they believe in abstaining from sex before marriage. (Only half of mainline Protestants, and a quarter of Jews, say that they believe in abstinence.)
- Evangelical virgins are the least likely to anticipate that sex will be pleasurable, and fear that having sex will cause their partners to lose respect for them.
- Evangelical Protestant teen-agers are significantly less likely to use contraception.
- According to sociologists Peter Bearman, of Columbia University, and Hannah Brückner, of Yale, communities with high rates of [teenage abstinence] pledging also have high rates of S.T.D.s.
- If too many teens in a given area pledge abstinence, the effort basically collapses. Pledgers like to think that they are an embattled minority; once their numbers exceed 30%, that special identity is lost.
- Abstinence is more likely to be maintained when a teenager has access to a close-knit community of friends and family to reinfoce the goal of abstinence. A religion-based institute is only one such choice.
- The age at marriage may be the pivotal difference between red and blue families. The five states with the lowest median age at marriage are all red states, while those with the highest are all blue. The red-state model puts couples at greater risk for divorce. Also, young couples are more likely to contend with the biggest stressors on a marriage: financial struggles and the birth of a baby.
- A new “abstinence-plus” curriculum, now growing in popularity, urges abstinence while providing accurate information about contraception and reproduction.
(…and what’s a rant without a little levity?)
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A little bit of glorious pre-marital sex never hurt anyone.