Teen Sex On Decline, Survey Finds Federal Study Is Good News After Troubling 20-Year Trend
For the first time in more than 20 years, there is evidence that the rising wave of premartial sexual intercourse among America’s teenagers finally may have crested and begun to subside.
New survey data released by the government Thursday show a decline in the percentage of unmarried teenage women and men who acknowledged having had sexual intercourse at some point between the ages of 15 and 19. These were the first declines ever recorded since the collection of such data began in the 1970s.
A large-scale study conducted in 1995 by the National Center for Health Statistics found that 50 percent of women 15 to 19 years old reported having had intercourse at least once, down from 55 percent in 1990. A parallel survey conducted for the government by the Urban Institute in 1995 showed a similar change among teenage men: Fifty-five percent of males between 15 and 19 years of age said they had had intercourse at some point, down from 60 percent in 1988.
“We welcome the news that the long-term increase in teenage sexual activity may finally have stopped,” Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala said in announcing the new data during a speech in Los Angeles on Thursday. “Continual increases in teen sexual activity are not inevitable.”
Shalala and others called for a redoubling of efforts to reduce teenage sexual activity, including a stronger message from adult society that teen sex is not acceptable. “We need to change the cultural messages that have been accepted too long,” Shalala said.
The magnitude of the rise in teenage sexual activity is reflected in the fact that in 1970, the year the NCHS began its periodic surveys, only 29 percent of women ages 15 to 19 reported having had sex.
“It was going up, and it didn’t just plateau, it dropped. And that’s good,” Kristin Moore, executive director of Child Trends Inc., a Washington-based research organization, said. “It changes the number of adolescents at risk by hundreds of thousands” for sexually transmitted diseases and for teen pregnancy.
“The longer kids delay, the better,” she said.
The NCHS survey also showed a steep increase in the use of contraceptive devices - particularly condoms - by teenage women during first-time intercourse. Fifteen years ago, the survey found, half of all teenage women used some form of contraception the first time they had sex; in the 1990s, three-quarters reported doing so.
The number of teen women reporting they had received formal training in using birth control, avoiding HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases and resisting pressure to have sex rose sharply as well.
Specialists attributed the decline in teen sex to a variety of factors, including fear of AIDS, more widespread sex education and changes in society’s moral values.
One of those who linked changes in teenage sexual activity to more emphatic moral standards in U.S. society was William Galston, a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland and board member of the National Campaign Against Teen Pregnancy. “There has been an important cultural shift in the last 10 years, relegitimizing the possibility of some moral judgments,” he said. xxxx KEY FINDINGS Findings of the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth: Two-thirds, or 66.7 percent, of births to teenagers were unintended, compared with 31 percent of births to women of all ages. Nearly half the women who marry before age 18 are divorced within 10 years, compared with just 19 percent of women who marry at age 23 or older. Two-thirds of women who had sex for the first time before age 16 had a partner who was under 18. Twenty-one percent said he was 18 or 19, 7 percent said he was 20 to 22, and 6 percent said he was 23 or older. More than one-third of teenage mothers breastfed their infants, compared with 55 percent of all mothers. About 16 percent of girls who had sex for the first time before age 16 said that their first intercourse was not voluntary. The same is true for just 3 percent of women who first had sex at age 20 or older.