Virginity pledges—oral or written promises to abstain from sexual activity until marriage—have become a hallmark of abstinence-only sex education (AOSE) programs. In order to qualify for funding, AOSE programs are required to adhere to an eight-point plan, which includes banning teachers from mentioning contraceptive methods and safer-sex practices, other than to emphasize their shortcomings, and requiring them to teach that “sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects.” The government uses virginity pledges to assess the effectiveness of AOSE programs, with success rates based strictly on number of pledgers, regardless of their subsequent sexual behavior. This method of measurement has proved problematic, as studies have shown less-than-desirable outcomes for pledgers, both in terms of overall low compliance rates and health risks incurred by those who broke their commitments.

Conducted in three waves in 1995, 1996, and 2001, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) was the first federally-funded, school-based study designed to assess risk factors for adolescents’ health-compromising behaviors, including sexual behavior. In their analysis of the data from the Add Health survey, entitled “Promising the Future: Virginity Pledges and First Intercourse,” Peter S. Bearman and Hannah Bruckner illuminated the limitations of virginity pledges. The pledge worked best among 15-17 year-olds, with no significant effect among older teenagers, and only impacted certain ethnic groups. As the proportion of students who pledged rose, the effectiveness of the pledge decreased. Teens were attracted to the pledge because it gave them a shared group identity that distinguished them from their peers. Once a pledge became normative and was no longer a part of a counterculture, it lost its allure. Therefore, in the words of Michael D. Resnick of the Center for Adolescent Health and Development at the University of Minnesota, virginity pledges “cannot work as a universal strategy.”

The biggest indicator that pledges were ineffective is that, although the pledge was found to delay intercourse an average of 18 months, a substantial proportion of pledgers became sexually active before marriage. Eighty-eight percent of pledgers who engaged in sexual intercourse did so before marriage. There are greater concerns than the mere ineffectiveness of the pledge: although pledgers delayed vaginal intercourse, the small portion of them who kept their pledge were more likely than virgins who had never pledged to report engaging in oral and anal sex. Despite forgoing vaginal intercourse, maintaining their technical “virginity,” in addition to protecting themselves against pregnancy, pledgers who engaged in “substitution behaviors” still put themselves at risk for acquiring STDs. This raises the possibility that virginity pledges affect the sequence of sexual behavior, instead of reducing it, inadvertently prompting teenagers to engage in alternative risky behaviors, such as oral sex, which teenagers, themselves, consider to be less intimate.

Ironically, virginity pledges might place some teenagers at greater risk for unintended pregnancies and STDs, since teens who broke the pledge were one-third less likely than nonpledgers to use contraceptives when they did become sexually active. “Pledgers are less likely to be prepared for an experience they have promised to forgo,” explain Bearman and Bruckner. “Pledgers, like other adolescents, may benefit from knowledge about contraception and pregnancy risk, even if it appears at the time that they do not need such knowledge.”

Self-identity may be another explanation for the pledgers unlikelines to use protection: using a condom implies acknowledging that one is engaging in forbidden sexual behavior. In the slippery slope of sexual activity, one could easily claim to just be “messing around” until a condom is pulled out, punctuating the action and officiating sex. Failure to use the physical marker of sexual activity could indicate failure to acknowledge oneself as a sexually active being.

An additional concern is the fact that pledgers were less likely to get tested and less likely to seek treatment for STDs—a blatant health risk. In fact, STDs did not vary significantly according to pledge status, despite the fact that pledgers had fewer years of sexual exposure, fewer partners, and fewer risky partners. According to J.D. Fortneberry’s 2005 editorial entitled “The Limits of Abstinence-Only in Preventing Sexually Transmitted Infections,” the data should be taken as “confirmation that absolutist approaches to STI prevention, whatever their moral, religious, or philosophic origins, incompletely serve those at risk.” (Fortenberry also notes that abstinence-only efforts ignore those adolescents who initially heed prevention messages, but later become sexually active, by “decreasing perceived risk or increasing stigma.”

Since the pledging intervention was not randomly assigned to adolescents—they self-selected their own conditions—the results of making a virginity pledge are impossible to address independently. J.D. Fortenberry explicates the confounding effect of self-selection on causal analysis: “It is possible that making a virginity pledge is simply a marker for adolescents with specific characteristics associated with later onset of sexual activity in the first place.” Janet Elise Rosenbaum addresses this issue in her innovative analysis of the Add Health data, entitled “Patient Teenagers? A Comparison of the Sexual Behavior of Virginity Pledgers and Matched Nonpledgers.” She notes that one year before pledging, pledgers are more religious, are less sexually experienced, and hold more negative attitudes about sex and birth control than their nonpledger counterparts. Religious adolescents tend to delay sexual initiation, so pre-pledge religiosity could account for the differential sexual outcomes of pledgers and nonpledgers, independently of pledge status.

Rosenbaum used unique statistical methods, matching pledgers and nonpledgers on a plethora of pre-pledge characteristics, to compare the sexual and contraceptive behavior of pledgers with that of similar nonpledgers. In other words, she analyzed the same data, adjusting for pre-pledge differences—and the results were astounding: despite having similar birth control attitudes one year before pledging, pledgers were significantly less likely to protect themselves against STDs and pregnancy. Rosenbaum attributes this difference to the fact that AOSE programs are designed to cause participants to develop negative attitudes about contraception. Ninety percent of abstinence funding doesn’t require that information be scientifically accurate. A 2004 review by the House of Representatives—entitled “The Content of Federally-Funded Abstinence-Only Education Programs”—found incorrect information in 11 of 13 federally-funded AOSE programs, with the most inaccurate information relating to birth control and condom effectiveness. Therefore, AOSE programs do not adequately prepare pledgers to protect their health in the event that they do engage in sexual activity.

Pledgers and nonpledgers did not differ much on most measures of sexual behavior, including the number of times they has intercourse in the past year, engagement in oral or anal sex, number of lifetime partners, age of onset of sexual activity, and STD diagnoses. The mean age for first vaginal sex in both groups was 21 and, contrary to the results of the Bearman and Bruckner study, although most pledgers reported having had premarital oral and vaginal sex, they did not appear to substitute oral and anal sex for vaginal sex. Pledgers reported having had 0.1 fewer sexual partners in the past year—with pledgers reporting an average of 1.1 partners and nonpledgers reporting an average of 1.2 partners. The modest difference was unlikely to affect STD risk, however, because the two groups do not differ significantly in the number of lifetime partners, age of initiation or STD prevalence.

In her June 2006 study, entitled “Reborn a Virgin: Adolescents’ Retracting of Virginity Pledges and Sexual Histories,” Janet Elise Rosenbaum presented yet another disturbing product of pledging: she found that pledgers were more likely than nonpledgers to report their behavior in logically inconsistent ways. A whopping 82% of those who had taken the oath denied, five years later, that they had done so—certainly not a testament to long-term dedication to the program. Pledge retraction was most common among those who were newly sexually active (73%) and among those who renounced a previous born-again Christian identity (63%). Conversely, retraction of sexual history was most common among recent adopters of virginity pledges (28%) and among born-again Christians (18%). Respondents who retracted the report of their sexual history had fewer sexual partners than those who did not, and those who had only one sexual partner were twice as likely to retract the report of their history as those who had more than one partner, which could indicate that some retractors considered their behavior to be experimental.

Reports of sexual behavior are vulnerable to distortion because of “respondents’ tendencies to answer survey questions in accordance with their current attitudes toward sexuality as well as their current behavior; when their current beliefs conflict with their past behaviors, their reports typically concur with the former rather than the latter.” One possible explanation for the inconsistent reporting of sensitive data, as opposed to data pertaining to more neutral topics, is the theory of cognitive dissonance: when there is a discrepancy between one’s attitudes and behavior, one will experience psychological discomfort. In order to minimize the tension, one is likely to adjust attitudes to coincide with behavior. Another explanation for biased recall is the usage of the availability heuristic, meaning that in the absence of definitive information, respondents may use their current activity as a reference point for gauging past sexual activity, causing currently inactive respondents to underestimate their past behavior.

Whatever the specific reasons for inconsistent reporting, Rosenbaum concludes, “Evaluations of sexual abstinence programs are vulnerable to unreliable data.” The recantation of reports of past sexual behavior is particularly concerning because, “If those who deny their sexual pasts perceive their history as correct, they will underestimate the sexually transmitted disease risk stemming from their prepledge sexual behavior (on average, these retractors had more than 2 sexual partners).” This—in conjunction with the stigma AOSE places on STDs—could explain why pledgers are less likely to get tested or treated for STDs, increasing their health risks and those of future partners. It is unclear whether adolescents believe that becoming “born again” or a “secondary virgin” erases their sexual history, or whether they acknowledge their past behavior but are scared to report it because it could call their religious commitment into question. Rosenbaum suggests that pledge programs be clear with pledgers about the risks stemming from previous behavior, regardless of current pledge status or current religious commitment. She also suggests, “Evaluations of abstinence education initiatives should incorporate outcome measures, such as STD assays, that are equally reliable for adolescents assigned to abstinence education and those assigned to a control group.”

In spite of the government’s extravagantly-funded—yet fundamentally misguided—efforts to deter adolescents from engaging in nonmarital sexual activity, teenage sexuality runs rampant. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s June 2008 report, teen sex has risen since 2001, with forty-eight percent of teens reporting that they had sex during the last year, compared with forty-six percent in 2001. Condom use declined slightly, with 62 percent of high school students using condoms in 2007, down from 63 percent in 2003. As a result, teenage pregnancies rose—for the first time in fifteen years—in 2006.

An analysis by the Guttmacher Institute found that “86% of the decline in teen pregnancy between 1995 and 2002 was due to teens’ increasing, and increasingly effective, use of contraception; only 14% was a result of teens’ delaying sexual onset.” This underscores the importance of educating adolescents on contraception, rather than exposing them to programs that foster negative attitudes and scientifically inaccurate beliefs about sex and birth control. Cynthia Dallard of the Guttmacher Institute elucidates the hazardous nature of abstinence-only sex education programs: “Given current pattern of teenage sexual activity, it is probably safe to say that efforts to prevent teenagers—let alone all married people—from engaging in anything potentially sexually stimulating are at best unrealistic. At worst, such efforts may have public health consequences, by failing to prepare young people for the time they, almost inevitably, will become sexually active.”