Vending machines at one Pennsylvania University doesn't just dispense soda and snacks -- it sells the morning-after pill.

At Shippensburg University, getting access to Plan B, the emergency contraception pill is as easy as getting a soda. Students can now buy the pill at a vending machine on campus. ...

Dr. Serr says that somewhere between 350 and 400 doses are sold each year to the female population. The pill can be legally sold over-the-counter to anyone 17 or older.

Labels: abortion, contraception, culture, premarital sex, universities

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In Catholic churches across the country, parishioners were read letters from the pulpit this weekend from bishops in their diocese about the mandate from the Department of Health and Human Services giving Catholics a year before they’ll be required to start violating their consciences on insurance coverage for contraception, sterilization, and abortifacient drugs. But not in the Army.

A statement released this afternoon — which happens to be the 67th anniversary of the sinking of the USS Dorchester, on which four chaplains lost their lives – from the Archdiocese for Military Services explains:

On Thursday, January 26, Archbishop Broglio emailed a pastoral letter to Catholic military chaplains with instructions that it be read from the pulpit at Sunday Masses the following weekend in all military chapels. The letter calls on Catholics to resist the policy initiative, recently affirmed by the United States Department of Health and Human Services, for federally mandated health insurance covering sterilization, abortifacients and contraception, because it represents a violation of the freedom of religion recognized by the U.S. Constitution.

The Army’s Office of the Chief of Chaplains subsequently sent an email to senior chaplains advising them that the Archbishop’s letter was not coordinated with that office and asked that it not be read from the pulpit. The Chief’s office directed that the letter was to be mentioned in the Mass announcements and distributed in printed form in the back of the chapel. ...

Following a discussion between Archbishop Broglio and the Secretary of the Army, The Honorable John McHugh, it was agreed that it was a mistake to stop the reading of the Archbishop’s letter. Additionally, the line: “We cannot — we will not — comply with this unjust law” was removed by Archbishop Broglio at the suggestion of Secretary McHugh over the concern that it could potentially be misunderstood as a call to civil disobedience.

Labels: Catholic Church, contraception, culture, religious liberty

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Many church-affiliated institutions will have to cover free birth control for employees, the Obama administration announced Friday in an election-year move that outraged religious groups, fueling a national debate about the reach of government.

In a concession, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said nonprofit institutions such as church-affiliated hospitals, colleges and social service agencies will have one additional year to comply with the requirement, issued in regulations under President Barack Obama's health care overhaul.

"I believe this proposal strikes the appropriate balance between respecting religious freedom and increasing access to important preventive services," Sebelius said in a statement.

Yet the concession was unlikely to stop a determined effort by opponents to block or overturn the rule. If they fail, some predicted that religious employers would simply drop coverage for their workers, opting instead to pay fines to the federal government under the health care law.

Labels: Catholic Church, contraception, religious liberty

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A new government study suggests a lot of teenage girls are clueless about their chances of getting pregnant.

In a survey of thousands of teenage mothers who had unintended pregnancies, about a third said they didn't use birth control because they didn't believe they could pregnant. ...

The researchers interviewed nearly 5,000 teenage girls in 19 states who gave birth after unplanned pregnancies in 2004 through 2008. The survey was done through mailed questionnaires with telephone follow-up.

About half of the girls in the survey said they were not using any birth control when they got pregnant. That's higher than surveys of teens in general, which have found that fewer than 20 percent said they didn't use contraception the last time they had sex. ...

Only 13 percent said they didn't use birth control because they had trouble getting it.

Another finding: Nearly a quarter of the teen moms said they did not use contraception because their partner did not want them to. That suggests that sex education must include not only information about anatomy and birth control, but also about how to deal with situations in which a girl feels pressured to do something she doesn't want to, Gavin said.

The findings are sobering, Albert said. But it's important to remember that the overall teen birth rate has been falling for some time, and recently hit its lowest mark in about 70 years.

Labels: adolescence, contraception, culture, motherhood, out-of-wedlock births, premarital sex, sex, teenage pregnancy

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American Catholics have by and large remained loyal to the core teachings and sacraments of their faith, but increasingly tune out the hierarchy on issues of sexual morality, according to a new study released Monday (Oct. 24)

The sweeping survey shows that over the last quarter-century, U.S. Catholics have become increasingly likely to say that individuals, not church leaders, have the final say on abortion, homosexuality, and divorce and remarriage.

That trend holds true across generational and ideological divides, and even applies to weekly Mass attenders, according to the survey, which has been conducted every six years since 1987. ...

The report identified two-thirds of U.S. Catholics as “moderately committed,” a group that inched up in size as the share of “highly committed” has shrunk from 27 percent in 1987 to 19 percent this year. ...

The issue of homosexuality showed one of the largest gaps between the pulpit and the pews. The portion of Catholics who say church leaders have “the final say” on homosexuality has plunged by half, from 32 percent to 16 percent, over the past 25 years, while those who say individuals make the final call has shot up from 39 percent to 57 percent.

Dillon noted that other issues have remained relatively stable, which leads her to conclude that Catholics are taking their cues from the larger culture, much like they did on birth control. ...

The loosening ties to the authority of the hierarchy may also parallel a diminishing commitment to the poor and to parish life.

In the 2011 survey, 60 percent of Catholics said you could be a good Catholic without donating time or money to help the poor, up from 44 percent in 2005. Similarly, three-quarters (74 percent) said you could be a good Catholic without donating time or money to a parish, up from 58 percent six years earlier. ...

The online survey of 1,400 adult Catholics (with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points) was conducted by D’Antonio, Gautier and Dillon in cooperation with the National Catholic Reporter, an independent newsweekly.

Labels: Catholic Church, contraception, culture, economics, homosexuality, religion

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President Obama this week used his health care law to hand a lucrative special favor to two industries that have ardently supported his party: Planned Parenthood and the drug industry.

The largesse came in the form of a rule proposed by the Department of Health and Human Services that would require all new insurance plans to cover the entire cost of all forms of prescription contraception -- including those that also act as abortion drugs.

This free-pills-for-all proposal embodies two dark themes of the Obama era: cronyism and trampling on the freedom of conscience.

Once again, Obama, who pretends to be battling the special interests, is rewarding powerful lobbies that support him. Even worse, the federal rule, which would effectively force everyone to purchase insurance that covers abortifacient contraceptives, also reveals the true shape of the Culture War in America: The Left uses the brutal tool of the government to impose its morality on everyone, forcing religious conservatives to act against conscience, all the while howling about imminent "theocracy."

Labels: abortion, contraception, culture, religious liberty

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Labels: contraception, culture, gay/straight differences, lesbians, men

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In October 2007 a son was born to Yigal Amir, the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin, and Larisa Trembovler, the divorcée and mother of four whom he had married by proxy while behind bars. The birth followed a series of controversial conjugal visits at the Ayalon Prison, where Amir was then incarcerated. These were in turn preceded by a lengthy court battle involving, at various times, the Israel Prison Service, the internal security service known as Shin Bet, various members of the Knesset, and the Amirs. ...

In the end, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled for Amir, determining that, like all prisoners, he was entitled to certain basic human rights, including the right to bring children into the world and to have a family. ...

In the pre-state period of the Yishuv, or Jewish community in British Mandatory Palestine, a Committee on Birthrate Problems was attached to the National Committee. It called upon David Ben-Gurion, later Israel’s first prime minister, to use both his moral and financial influence to increase the Jewish birthrate. It also asked for the establishment of a “childbirth regime” as “a cornerstone of our Zionist policy and as one of the main functions of our social and local offices; not less important than recruitment to the army, spreading the Hebrew language, purchasing land or maintaining the right for immigration.”

After the establishment of the state in May 1948, in an attempt to encourage an increase in the birth rate, Ben-Gurion introduced a birth prize awarding 100 lira, then the Israeli currency, and a signed letter to every woman on the birth of her 10th child. Though the amount itself was largely symbolic, the program received significant media attention and even became the subject of a popular dictum: “In honor of the motherland/ Ten boys to be born/ With grandeur we receive/ Ben-Gurion’s prize.”

In 1967 the Israeli demographic center was established to act systematically to realize a state policy directed at raising the Jewish birth rate. In 1968 the Fund for Encouraging Fertility was set up to offer subsidized housing loans for families with three or more children and in which one member had served in the Israel Defense Forces. The 1970 Veteran’s Child Allowance Scheme similarly provided child allowances to large families in which at least one member had served in the IDF or another national security service. Given that Jews are required to do military service—and Arabs exempt from it— some have argued these policies had a de facto discriminatory effect, supporting and encouraging an increase in specifically Jewish fertility.

Today, there are more fertility clinics per capita in Israel than in any other country in the world. Every Israeli, regardless of religion or marital status, is entitled to unlimited rounds of in-vitro fertilization treatment free of charge up to the birth of two live children (or even three, under some health insurance policies). In 1996 Israel passed the Embryo Carrying Agreements Law, making Israel the first country in the world to legalize surrogate mother agreements. According to a 2006 paper prepared for the Knesset, 1,800 IVF treatment cycles are performed each year per million people in Israel, compared to 240 in the United States. A 2010 article in Haaretz stated that Israel performs the highest ratio of fertility treatments among developed Western nations.

Labels: abortion, Artificial Reproductive Technology, contraception, demographics, Israel, IVF, natalism

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My mother fought for free love and the right to sexual expression. I fight the traffic as I squire my kids up and down Madison Avenue. Both sets of my grandparents had open marriages. I have a closed marriage (that’s where you only sleep with the person you are married to). My mother’s mother tells stories of sleeping with my grandfather in the woods and smoking "grass." There are not a lot of woods where I live in Manhattan. If it is every generation’s job to swing the pendulum back, then I have done mine.

My father’s father (Howard Fast) was famous for his communism, Spartacus and his various exploits with members of the opposite sex around Hollywood. One of my aunts is known at her prep school for being straight then gay and then straight again. A deceased grandaunt of mine was notorious for being one of the most sexually active octogenarians at The Hebrew Home for the Aged. ...

Later we unzipped our backpacks and placed the condoms in the center of the large wooden table. The teacher congratulated us for our courage and ability to remove money from our wallets. We then proceeded to open the condoms and put them on bananas. Even at the tender age of twelve we understood how profoundly misguided our teachers were. We weren’t stupid idiots. We knew how to go into a store and buy things. Most of us smoked at least a few cigarettes a day by twelve years old. We weren’t short bus riders. Kids have unsafe sex because they think they are invincible not because they are too stupid to buy condoms. It did not create a class of safe-sex zealots, as I think our teachers might have hoped. It did, however, make sex seem somehow unsexy.

Labels: contraception, culture, girls, Marriage, open relationships, pornography, sex, sex education, women

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Among young, single Americans, men still want sex and women still want love and commitment. But the rules of engagement have changed dramatically since the birth-control pill and these rules “clearly favor men,” sociology professor Mark Regnerus told a think tank Tuesday.

There is collateral damage in this modern paradigm, added Mr. Regnerus, co-author of “Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think About Marrying.”

More than a few women who plan to marry and have children before age 40 will not be able to fulfill those plans, he said. And men are becoming obsolete to women, especially those who were taught to rely only on themselves. ...

The changes in sexual norms happened largely because of the birth-control pill, Mr. Regnerus told the “Sexual Economics” forum at the Heritage Foundation.

Before the pill, the University of Texas professor said, sex and marriage were closely linked. If a young man wanted to have sex with a young woman, he had to “pay an elevated price” for it, with a marriage proposal, if not marriage. The young woman, in turn, got a serious commitment from the young man in exchange for her sexual favors.

But the pill ended that exchange rate, he said. Now sex is conducted without marriage, and “the price of sex is pretty low” — low-commitment or no-commitment sexual hookups are common, while high-commitment marriage is postponed, sometimes for decades.

Labels: beyond marriage, contraception, culture, hooking up, Mark Regnerus, Marriage, men, premarital sex, sex, women

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Much of the attraction between the sexes is chemistry. New studies suggest that when women use hormonal contraceptives, such as birth-control pills, it disrupts some of these chemical signals, affecting their attractiveness to men and women's own preferences for romantic partners.

The type of man a woman is drawn to is known to change during her monthly cycle—when a woman is fertile, for instance, she might look for a man with more masculine features. Taking the pill or another type of hormonal contraceptive upends this natural dynamic, making less-masculine men seem more attractive, according to a small but growing body of evidence. The findings have led researchers to wonder about the implications for partner choice, relationship quality and even the health of the children produced by these partnerships.

Evolutionary psychologists and biologists have long been interested in factors that lead to people's choice of mates. One influential study in the 1990s, dubbed the T-shirt study, asked women about their attraction to members of the opposite sex by smelling the men's T-shirts. The findings showed that humans, like many other animals, transmit and recognize information pertinent to sexual attraction through chemical odors known as pheromones.

The study also showed that women seemed to prefer the scents of men whose immune systems were most different from the women's own immune-system genes known as MHC. The family of genes permit a person's body to recognize which bacteria are foreign invaders and to provide protection from those bugs. Evolutionarily, scientists believe, children should be healthier if their parents' MHC genes vary, because the offspring will be protected from more pathogens. ...

Both men's and women's preferences in mates shift when a woman is ovulating, the period when she is fertile, research has shown. Some studies have tracked women's responses to photos of different men, while other studies have interviewed women about their feelings for men over several weeks. Among the conclusions: When women are ovulating, they tend to be drawn to men with greater facial symmetry and more signals of masculinity, such as muscle tone, a more masculine voice and dominant behaviors. The women also seemed to be particularly attuned to MHC-gene diversity. From an evolutionary perspective, these signals are supposed to indicate that men are more fertile and have better genes to confer to offspring.

Women tend to exhibit subtle cues when they are ovulating, and men tend to find them more attractive at this time.

Labels: adultery, animal research, children, contraception, gender, gender differences, men, sex, women

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One in four children in the United States is being raised by a single parent — a percentage that has been on the rise and is higher than other developed countries, according to a report released Wednesday.

Of the 27 industrialized countries studied by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the U.S. had 25.8 percent of children being raised by a single parent, compared with an average of 14.9 percent across the other countries.

Ireland was second (24.3 percent), followed by New Zealand (23.7 percent). Greece, Spain, Italy and Luxemborg had among the lowest percentages of children in single-parent homes.

Experts point to a variety of factors to explain the high U.S. figure, including a cultural shift toward greater acceptance of single-parent child rearing. The U.S. also lacks policies to help support families, including childcare at work and national paid maternity leave, which are commonplace in other countries. ...

Single parents in the U.S. were more likely to be employed — 35.8 percent compared to a 21.3 percent average — but they also had higher rates of poverty, the report found. ...

The single parent phenomenon has been occurring over recent decades. The study noted the U.S. and England have higher teenage birthrates than other countries, partially contributing to the higher single-parent numbers, though the proportion of children born outside marriage was not significantly higher than the other countries.

Christina Gibson Davis, a professor at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, said changing gender roles, the rise of contraception, high incarceration rates in some communities and an acceptance of having children out of wedlock have all contributed to the growing number.

Labels: children, class, contraception, culture, economics, out-of-wedlock births, parenting, poverty, single parenting, unmarried parents, work/family policy

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In view of the upcoming 2010 elections the Filipino bishops have reiterated their no to abortion, euthanasia and other policies against family values and invited the public to vote for candidates who fight for life. For this purpose they have published the guide "The Catechism on Family and Life for the 2010 elections”. It is the result of the meeting of the national commission of family and life of the Episcopal Conference on 30 November in Antipolo City (Manila). ...

The debate on Reproductive Health has been ongoing for four years. Despite UN support in favour of the law it has never reached the quorum of 120 votes needed for approval. This is due to the opposition of Catholic lawmakers and the support of Philippine President Gloria Arroyo, who has always been contrary to policies of family planning and abortion. The law rejects abortion clinics, but supports a program of family planning, which prevents couples from having more than two children, punishable by the payment of a penalty and in some cases prison. The program supports the spread to all schools and public places of birth control pills, which have been banned by law, condoms and the promotion of voluntary sterilization. The Church and Catholic pro - life organizations instead promote the Natural Family Program (NFP), which aims at providing the people a culture of responsibility and love based on Christian values.

Labels: Catholic Church, contraception, Philippines, population control, religion

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The new results from the National Survey of Sexual Health are now out. Done in the spring of 2009, the survey reports on the sexual behaviors of 5,865 American adolescents and adults ages 14 to 94. Researchers at Indiana University's Center for Sexual Health Promotion found ....
* While about 7% of adult women and 8% of men identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual, the proportion of individuals in the U.S. who have had same-gender sexual interactions at some point in their lives is higher.
* At any given point in time, most U.S. adolescents are not engaging in partnered sexual behavior. While 40% of 17 year-old males reported vaginal intercourse in the past year, only 27% reported the same in the past 90 days.

Labels: adolescence, contraception, culture, homosexuality, men, sex, women

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...Rare it isn’t: not when one in five pregnancies ends at the abortion clinic. So it was a victory for realism, at least, when MTV decided to supplement its hit reality shows “16 and Pregnant” and “Teen Mom” with last week’s special, “No Easy Decision,” which followed Markai Durham, a teen mother who got pregnant a second time and chose abortion.

MTV being MTV, the special’s attitude was resolutely pro-choice. But it was a heartbreaking spectacle, whatever your perspective. Durham and her boyfriend are the kind of young people our culture sets adrift — working-class and undereducated, with weak support networks, few authority figures, and no script for sexual maturity beyond the easily neglected admonition to always use a condom. Their televised agony was a case study in how abortion can simultaneously seem like a moral wrong and the only possible solution — because it promised to keep them out of poverty, and to let them give their first daughter opportunities they never had.

The show was particularly wrenching, though, when juxtaposed with two recent dispatches from the world of midlife, upper-middle-class infertility. Last month there was Vanessa Grigoriadis’s provocative New York Magazine story “Waking Up From the Pill,” which suggested that a lifetime on chemical birth control has encouraged women “to forget about the biological realities of being female ... inadvertently, indirectly, infertility has become the Pill’s primary side effect.” Then on Sunday, The Times Magazine provided a more intimate look at the same issue, in which a midlife parent, the journalist Melanie Thernstrom, chronicled what it took to bring her children into the world: six failed in vitro cycles, an egg donor and two surrogate mothers, and an untold fortune in expenses.

In every era, there’s been a tragic contrast between the burden of unwanted pregnancies and the burden of infertility. But this gap used to be bridged by adoption far more frequently than it is today. Prior to 1973, 20 percent of births to white, unmarried women (and 9 percent of unwed births over all) led to an adoption. Today, just 1 percent of babies born to unwed mothers are adopted, and would-be adoptive parents face a waiting list that has lengthened beyond reason. ...

This is the paradox of America’s unborn. No life is so desperately sought after, so hungrily desired, so carefully nurtured. And yet no life is so legally unprotected, and so frequently destroyed.

Labels: abortion, adoption, Artificial Reproductive Technology, class, contraception, culture, donor conception, infertility, out-of-wedlock births, premarital sex, Ross Douthat

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In 1998, Fugees frontwoman and single mother Lauryn Hill scored a hit with her hip-hop ode to her son Zion, in which she described how the people around her had pressured her to abort him: “They said, ‘Lauryn baby, use your head’ / But instead I chose to use my heart. / Now the joy of my world is in Zion!”

Hill’s voice won’t be found in Naomi Cahn’s and June Carbone’s deeply flawed, intermittently important book. In fact, Red Families v. Blue Families contains virtually no voices representing alternatives to the elite lifestyle of contraception, college (and probably postgraduate) education, and late childbearing. The book is replete with numbers, but because it incorporates very little qualitative research—in which the voices behind the numbers might get a chance to explain themselves—it’s impossible to gauge the accuracy of Cahn/Carbone’s analyses of the reasons behind the American class-based marriage gap.

Judging by my admittedly limited experience, Red Families offers a sanitized picture of elite family life—ignoring the degree to which shame, and abortion in response to shame, shapes elite young women’s choices—and a distorted picture of underclass and lower middle-class family life, explaining class-based differences in out-of-wedlock childbearing and pregnancy as a result of lack of access to contraception, which is one of the very few explanations I think I’ve literally never heard from any lower-income woman.

Although Cahn/Carbone clearly want to offer solutions to the multiple and conflicting crises in American family structures, solutions which respect and can be accommodated by a wide variety of different communities and world views, they are ultimately unable to articulate or understand any alternative to what they’ve (somewhat crudely) decided to call the blue family model. ...

In their final and best chapter, Cahn/Carbone also offer a passionate call for a radical restructuring in how our economy accommodates parents and parents-to-be. The unionized factory jobs which stereotypically supported a breadwinner-homemaker family, where the spouses married right after high school, have been replaced by service- and-information-economy jobs which require highly specialized education and licensing: fields like cosmetology and medical-information processing. This volatile economy requires a much more flexible structure in which work, family, and education can interweave.

Labels: abortion, abstinence, contraception, culture, divorce, economics, Eve Tushnet, June Carbone, Marriage, Naomi Cahn, out-of-wedlock births, Red Families v. Blue Families

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... In 2008 and 2009 we asked close to a thousand students, mostly freshmen and sophomores, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, to tell us about their sex lives. In this anonymous web-based survey we also asked them to which religious denomination they belonged. Almost everybody who claims to belong to a religion also believes in God. A lot of students -- just shy of a third -- don't identify with any religion. But just because somebody doesn't belong does not mean they don't believe. About a quarter of those unaffiliated nonetheless believe in God. Most commonly, they believe in a higher, ordering power or cosmic force, but not God, not the big Who. True atheists are a tiny minority in the sample -- about eight percent.

With all these God-believers, it is striking that most students -- nearly 60 percent -- don't think sexual intercourse before marriage is wrong, at all. If you look at the table below, you can see that very small proportions -- even among the conservative Christians -- think it is absolutely wrong. Eighteen percent of the Evangelical students think such sex is absolutely wrong. That's less than the 25 percent of those students who took a virginity pledge. ...

If, within a particular religious community, the percentage who think sex it is not at all wrong is less than the percentage who have had sexual intercourse, you have a kind of "guilt gap," a rough relative likelihood that young people in that community will have had sex but think there is something shameful in what they have done. For the Protestants, unlike the Catholics and the Jews, the "guilt gap" is huge: 21 percent more mainline Protestants have had sex than think there is nothing morally wrong about it; for Evangelicals the gap is 29 percent. That is a lot of guilty sex. For Catholics and Jews, the gap is 10 percent and 2 percent, respectively. For those who don't belong to any religion, there is a guilt deficit.

The problem with guilty sex is that it is sex students don't expect to have, for which they are not prepared, executed in the heat of passion, often -- if students came out of an abstinence-only sex education -- without much knowledge. (In this respect, these religious differences are even more striking because the State of California stood by its comprehensive sex education approach and opted out of Federal abstinence funding. That means that most of these students had some school-based sexual education.) Although the numbers are small, the pregnancy rate is also much higher for Protestant girls. Catholic and Jewish girls hardly ever get pregnant. Half of those Protestant pregnancies, mainline and Evangelical alike, ended in abortion. Protestant guilt is killing the unborn.

Labels: abortion, Catholic Church, Christianity, contraception, culture, Judaism, premarital sex, religion, sex, universities

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...Contrary to what some of my friends in the gay-marriage movement believe, however, homophobia is far from the only reason for opposition. Another group, which I think is at least equally large, feels threatened—less by the normalization of homosexuality than by the abnormalization, so to speak, of the conventionally defined family. “Nothing personal, do what you want,” they tell us, “but leave the definition of family—of marriage—alone!”

One way to see that more is going on than homophobia is to reflect, for a moment, on a peculiar fact: gay marriage is far more controversial in America than either same-sex adoption or same-sex child custody.

Think about that. Isn’t it odd? The care of children, by definition, involves third parties who often have little or no choice about their situation. If there is a case for harm, one would think it would be strongest here—not in the union of two mutually consenting adults. In fact, the other side has a very hard time articulating any concrete harm at all that gay marriage would do. Yet efforts to make a political issue of gay adoption have consistently failed, while, wherever it appears, gay marriage finds it cannot not be a political issue.

What is behind the alarm raised by gay marriage?

To answer this question, I think one must widen the aperture and look at same-sex marriage in the context of a much larger cultural battle over the nature of family, of marriage, and even of adulthood: a debate over what it is that constitutes, and should constitute, the template for “normal” in all of those areas.

Labels: contraception, culture, divorce, economics, gay marriage, Jonathan Rauch, June Carbone, Marriage, men, Naomi Cahn, out-of-wedlock births, poverty, Red Families v. Blue Families

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...But while it may be our natural, god-given right to freak out about the sex lives of adolescents -- and though it does seem as if unfettered access to the likes of Lady Gaga's disco stick, Ludacris's sex room and the wilds of the Internet have helped take burgeoning sexuality to a whole new level -- it appears that young people today really aren't any more promiscuous than we were. In fact, in the aggregate they're actually less so, according to a new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics.

This survey of more than 2,700 teenagers across the country found that 43 percent of boys and 42 percent of girls between ages 15 and 19 say they have had sex, a figure that's more or less unchanged since 2002 and compares with 55 percent of boys and 51 percent of girls in 1988. The new data, from 2006 to 2008, also showed that contraceptive use has remained steady in recent years, with 87 percent of boys and 79 percent of girls reporting that they employed some form of birth control the first time they had sex.

"The good news is that we've been able to at least hold the line on the number of kids still deciding to wait on becoming sexually active," says Kathy Woodward, medical director of the Adolescent Health Center at Children's National Medical Center. "For those of us who believe in prevention and education, we'd like to nudge that number higher, but at least we're staying the course, especially when you consider all of the media influences out there." ...

For one thing, accept that it's going to be a challenge, says Christopher Daddis, an assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University who researched how 222 teenagers talked to their parents about dating and sex for a recent study in the Journal of Adolescence. He found that girls tend to disclose more about crushes, relationships and other dating topics than boys, that both sexes prefer to share such information with their mothers rather than their fathers, and that they were equally reticent to discuss sex, per se, with either parent. Younger teens had a higher level of communication than older adolescents on all topics, and those who reported a greater level of trust with their parents also opened up more about sex -- especially girls.

Labels: adolescence, contraception, culture, parenting, pregnancy, premarital sex, sex, STDs, teenage pregnancy

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Over the last few decades, the period between the time when young adults leave their parents' house and when they settle down to start families has grown substantially. In 1970, 21% of 25-year-olds were unmarried; by 2005, the percentage had jumped to 60%.

Marked by self-discovery and exploration, this phase of life has been dubbed the "odyssey years" by some. And along with determining their career and life goals, many unmarried adults in their 20s are also trying to figure out how to manage their sex lives.

According to a poll published earlier this year by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, 86% of unmarried people ages 18 to 29 are sexually active. And though it may not be surprising that 87% of the same group reported that they are not ready to have kids — including 88% of women and 86% of men — their actions don't always line up with their intentions.

Among the group polled by the National Campaign, nearly half of those who are in a sexual relationship either don't use contraception at all or use it inconsistently, and almost 20% of all respondents predict that they'll have unprotected sex within the next three months.

The result? Seven in 10 pregnancies in the 18-to-29 age group are unintended, and men and women in their 20s have among the highest rates of sexually transmitted infections of any age group, including chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis. ...

Many young adults also have deep-rooted — and occasionally conflicting — feelings about becoming parents. Though they may not be ready for children at this point, many want kids someday, and 32% of those polled by the National Campaign said they'd be "very pleased" or "a little pleased" to find out that they or their partner were pregnant.

The percentage of men who reported that they would be pleased in the event of an unintended pregnancy was more than twice that of women.

Labels: contraception, culture, out-of-wedlock births

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