Harvard Virginity-Pledge Study Challenged

You may have heard reports that virginity-pledges don't work and that teens who take the pledge are often sexually active months later.

Here is a response to that report.

From Focus on the Family

Harvard Virginity-Pledge Study Challenged

from staff reports

Research examined decade-old data.

Half the teens who take virginity pledges deny they did as early as one year later, at least according to a Harvard University study published in the American Journal of Public Health Research.

Janet Rosenbaum, author of the Harvard study, told Family News in Focus the goal was not to refute virginity pledges.

"This isn't an evaluation of virginity pledges," she said. "It really deals with a methodological issue that you think about when designing a study."

But abstinence-education experts call the study deceptive and misleading.

Dr. Janice Crouse with Concerned Women for America pointed out that the study examined data from a decade or more ago.

"In the last 10 years we've had so many different studies that we released that show that abstinence pledges do work," she said. "Clearly you've got something at work here that's an agenda from the left."

Georgia state officials reported last week that teen pregnancy and abortion rates have gone down for another consecutive year, reflecting a nationwide drop that began in the early 1990s.