Nearly All Americans Have Premarital Sex

A recent study has revealed that about 9 of ten Americans of both genders have had premarital sex. It was found out that the high rates include even women born in the 1940s who insist that that people were more decent and more chaste in the past.

The main purpose of the study was to examine how premarital sexual behavior has changed over time. The study was based on interviews with about 38,000 people (circa 33,000 of them being women) in 1982, 1988, 1995 and 2002. Interviews were conducted by the federal National Survey of Family Growth. It showed that 99 percent of interviewed people had had sex by age 44 with 95 per cent of them who had their first sex before marriage.

One of the most interesting things revealed is that even those who did not have sex until being at least 20, fourth fifths had premarital sex.

It was revealed that today's Americans are as likely to have sex before marriage as sixty years ago, in spite of the fact that now people get married later and thus are sexually active being single for quite long periods.

What to difference between genders the study revealed that women are about as likely as men to have premarital sex , even those who were born many years ago. The figures are as follows: about 91 per cent of women born between 1950 and 1978 had had sex before marriage by age 30 whereas about 88 per cent of women born in the 1940 had premarital sex by age 44.

Results of Research and Abstinence-Before-Marriage-Only Program

The author of the research Lawrence Finer makes the following conclusion: so high rate of premarital sex proves sex before marriage to be normal sexual behavior for overwhelming majority of Americans. What is more, it has been so for many decades.

As well Lawrence Finer who is a research director at the Guttamacher Institute insists that the data acquired during the research shows that government-funded abstinence-only programs contradict the reality as they are aimed at to make Americans completely change their normal sexual behavior.

Abstinence-before-marriage programs being under the Bust administration, have received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding!

Finer is absolutely convinced that it would be more effective to teach young people necessary skills and to provide them with information which will help them to enjoy safer sex. This information should be provided to any young person once he or she has become sexually active. Naturally this implies that teens should be taught safer sexual behavior: abstaining from casual sex contacts, using condoms and many other necessary things.

Naturally, Finer has his opponents, such as Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families at the U. S Department of Health and Human Services. He believes that young people should be taught to abstain from sex before marriage. According to Wade Horn a person should delay the onset of his or her sexual activity as long as possible as a person should have the fewest number of lifetime sex partners as possible. Horn believes that only this way people can decrease the risk of contracting a sexually transmitted disease.

As well Horn insists that the government has no mission against sex before marriage among adults. According to him, the Bush administration has no intention to regulate sexual behavior of adults.

Horn considers the results of the research to be plausible and hopes that society will not consider stupid the small minority of those who prefer to abstain from sex before marriage.

However, not everyone shares Horn's opinion. Janice Crouse of Concerned Women for America which is a conservative group actively supporting abstinence-before-marriage-only program, said she does not quite believe the results of the research are true.

At the same time Leslee Unruh, the leader of an organization based in South Dakota promoting abstinence-only education is going to do everything to increase considerably the numbers of young people who would be open to remain virgins until marriage.