Health Buzz: Virginity Pledges and Other Health News

Religion is to blame for more needless deaths

This study shows us that religion is again responsible for the needless death of children.

Religious groups tell teenagers filled with rushing hormones to hate their bodies and their natural impulses and to avoid condoms and birth control at all costs.

The policy doesn't work. What we discover is that children with repressed sexuality end up as very disturbed people, like the suicide bombers of the Muslim religion, who will kill themselves to finally have access to virginal women in heaven.

This study demonstrates that the kids following their religions ban on birth control end up having sex anyway and endangering themselves and their partners.

It's time to stop this reliance on invisible fairies and tell our children the truth about sex and give them the facts about birth control (including proper and safe methods and failure rates).

Soft science playing with statistics

What were the qualifications for selecting students that were more likely to abstain? Were they all dorks that couldn't get a date anyway. I might have been able to find a data set of students that have no chance of sexual activity showing that the pledgers were far more likely to have sex than their "peers". Here is another example of a soft scientist manipulating existing data in order to get a required publication.

At what age

It would be interesting to see if the pledges had sex at a later age than non-plegers.

Study data

Why don't they ever include the data for these studies, but rather make subjective statements about the results.

Here is a link to the data: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content-nw/full/123/1/e110/T2

Pledgers are 4% less likely to be sexually active, but statistically could be 10% less likely or 3% more likely. The average is lower though and these are very small sample sizes.