The 1993 grass-roots campaign "True Love Waits" touched off a movement that encouraged teens to sign pledges to remain virgins until marriage. Just two years later, 2.2 million adolescents (about 12 percent of the teenage population) had signed a True Love Waits or similar pledge card. Research has shown that teens who sign the cards are likely to wait longer to have sex than those who don't. Now, Yale and Columbia university researchers looked at whether the pledge cards also helped protect teens from sexually transmitted diseases.

What the researchers wanted to know: Does signing virginity pledge cards reduce the rate of STDs among teens?

What they did: The researchers used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a sample of students from grades seven through 12 enrolled in 1995. In 2001 and 2002, they took urine samples from about 14,000 students and tested them for three sexually transmitted diseases: chlamydia, gonorrhea, and trichomoniasis. The participants were asked, both when they enrolled and at the time the urine sample was taken, if they had ever signed a virginity pledge, in questionnaires that also asked about other aspects of their life and health.

What they found: While pledgers were likely to wait longer before having sex and have fewer sexual partners, both pledgers and nonpledgers had similar rates of STD infection. Pledgers, however, were less likely to be tested for STDs and less likely to be aware that they had them. In addition, pledgers who had sex were much less likely to use a condom than teens who had not taken a pledge. For married participants, the rate of STD infection remained the same among pledgers and nonpledgers, suggesting that marriage may not protect against STD exposure.

What it means to you: Apparently, signing a pledge card doesn't guarantee that teens won't have sex—and doesn't protect them from sexually transmitted diseases either. The researchers speculate that students who sign virginity pledge cards could be less likely to use protection if they do have sex or see a doctor if they have symptoms of STDs, for fear that they'll be stigmatized for breaking their pledges. Teaching adolescents about safe sex, regardless of whether or not they sign pledges, is the best way to go, the researchers say.

Caveats: There is a chance that teens may have had sex, contracted an STD, and then decided to sign a pledge—as what the researchers call "secondary virgins." To make sure that these participants were not skewing their data, the researchers separated them out. They found that these students had a lower rate of STD infection than those who pledged and later had sex (5.5 percent versus 7.3 percent).

Find out more: For information about the federal government's abstinence-based program (as of 2002) to prevent teenage pregnancy, check out the Department of Health and Human Services.

Many states have the goals of their sexual education programs on their government websites. Check out http://www.michigan.gov for an example that encourages waiting, but also has a goal of teaching behaviors to reduce STD transmission.

For more information, including links to sites to help prevent teenage pregnancy or resources for teens who are pregnant, visit the National Institutes of Health.

The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy also has pages and pages of information.

Read the article: Bruckner, H. and Bearman, P. "After the Promise: The STD Consequences of Adolescent Virginity Pledges." Journal of Adolescent Health. April 2005, Vol. 36, No. 4, pp. 271–278.

Abstract online: http://www.sciencedirect.com