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Everybody really is doing it

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published December 20, 2006

NEW YORK - More than nine out of 10 Americans, men and women alike, have had premarital sex, according to a new study. The high rates extend even to women born in the 1940s, challenging perceptions that people were more chaste in the past.

"This is reality-check research," said the study's author, Lawrence Finer. "Premarital sex is normal behavior for the vast majority of Americans, and has been for decades."

Finer is a research director at the Guttmacher Institute, a New York think tank that studies sexual and reproductive issues and opposes government-funded programs that rely primarily on abstinence-only teachings. The study, released Tuesday, appears in the new issue of Public Health Reports.

The study, examining how sexual behavior before marriage has changed, was based on interviews conducted with more than 38,000 people - about 33,000 of them women - in 1982, 1988, 1995 and 2002 for the federal National Survey of Family Growth. According to Finer's analysis, 99 percent of the respondents had sex by age 44, and 95 percent had done so before marriage.

Even among a subgroup of those who abstained from sex until at least age 20, four-fifths had premarital sex by age 44, the study found.

Finer said people now wait longer to get married and thus are sexually active as singles for extensive periods.

The study found women virtually as likely as men to engage in premarital sex. Among women born between 1950 and 1978, at least 91 percent had premarital sex by age 30, he said. For those born in the 1940s, 88 percent had sex by age 44.

"The data clearly show that the majority of older teens and adults have already had sex before marriage, which calls into question the federal government's funding of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs for 12- to 29-year-olds," Finer said.

But Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said the abstinence-only approach for teenagers is simply common sense.

"One of its values is to help young people delay the onset of sexual activity," he said. "The longer one delays, the fewer lifetime sex partners they have, and the less the risk of contracting a sexually transmitted disease."

[Last modified December 20, 2006, 01:19:45]