Teens trend toward sex delay
WASHINGTON — The number of high school-aged teens who are having sex dropped markedly over a decade, a trend that includes substantial declines among younger students, AfricanAmericans and Hispanics, according to a new government report.
The survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed steep declines in the last two years. It adds to evidence about ongoing progress in reducing risky behavior by teenagers, who are becoming pregnant, smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol and using marijuana at lower rates than younger people before them, according to public health surveys.
“Early initiation of sexual activity is associated with having more sexual partners, not using condoms, sexually transmitted infection and pregnancy during adolescence,” the report said.
It called the falling rate of sexual activity among ninthand 10th-graders “especially encouraging.”
The researchers said they could not attribute the trend “directly to any specific intervention,” but experts have cited access in school and online to straightforward information about sex and contraception.
Laura Lindberg, principal research scientist at the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit organization that studies reproductive rights and health, said the majority of the decline occurred between 2013 and 2015.
“So we need to see if this is a short-term blip or this is something that is going to continue,” Lindberg said. “The drops are very large in 2015, and that raises questions of survey value.”
The results differ from another national survey conducted in teenagers’ homes, which shows little change in sexual activity. The National Youth Risk Behavior Surveys cited in this month’s report are conducted in school.
The finding that ninthand 10th-graders are delaying sexual initiation is a welcome development that most likely results from the end of federally funded school programs that taught abstinence until marriage, she said. In 2010, the Obama administration replaced that curriculum with “medically accurate” information about sex and contraception, Lindberg said.
“The big takeaway for me here is that even with the observed delay in sex, by the time they graduate high school, it’s still the case that more than half of student have had sex,” Lindberg said.Overall, 41.2 percent of high school students reported ever having sexual intercourse in 2015, down from 46.8 percent two years earlier, according to the CDC’s National Youth Risk Behavior Survey.