NEWS MEDIA CENTER

True Love Waits Captures Media Interest, Influences Society

August 2004

NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- True Love Waits in the United States has its own success story to tell, thanks in no small part to immense world-wide media interest in the teenage sexual abstinence movement that garnered headlines and bylines in the early and mid 1990s when much attention was being given to “safe sex” messages to America’s youth and hardly any notice to “save sex for marriage.”

Media outlets, including some of the world’s largest and best known newspapers, magazines, TV and radio programs, have reported on and interviewed students and True Love Waits spokespeople since the program was introduced in 1993. The list includes New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Dallas Morning News, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Associated Press, 48 Hours, 20/20, Oprah, MTV, Nightline, Newsweek, Time, Life, Mademoiselle, Marie Clair, Woman’s Day, Rolling Stone, CBS Radio Network, USA Radio Network, Paul Harvey, Family News in Focus, NPR and CNN Radio. By the fall of 1996, 600 media relationships had been established, and that number has grown much larger today.

One hundred other organizations—secular and religious—have adopted the use of True Love Waits to promote sexual abstinence. Christian authors James Dobson, Robert Schuller and Josh McDowell support True Love Waits’ approach to moral purity. A large number of Christian artists have endorsed the campaign’s message, including Rebecca St. James, Steven Curtis Chapman, Michael W. Smith, dc Talk, Out of Eden, Newsboys, Jaci Valesquez, and LaRue.

During the decade that True Love Waits has been in existence, trend lines for teenage pregnancy have declined after peaking in 1991. According to the National Vital Statistics Report, teenage pregnancy reached an all-time low in 2002 of 23.2 births for every 1,000 girls ages 15 to 17 and 43 births for every 1,000 girls ages 15-19. The 1990s saw a significant increase in high school students who say they are virgins, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which publishes the National Vital Statistics Report. By 2001, high school virgins outnumbered students who were sexually active 54 percent to 46percent. Ten years earlier, those percentages were reversed.

The American Journal of Sociology published a study in 2001 that reported teenagers who pledge to remain sexually abstinent until marriage are 34 percent less likely to have sex than those who do not pledge. Researchers conducting the study noted the delay effect is “substantial and almost impossible to erase.” The pledge works, the study suggests, because it creates an “identity movement” or “moral community” that provides peer support for the teen.

At the time the 1999 study was released, one of its authors, Dr. Peter Bearman, reported 2.5 million teens in the United States had taken public virginity pledges. By the time the study was published in 2001, Bearman believed that number to be closer to 3 million.

Earlier this year, the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. assessed the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health’s tracking since 1994 of virginity pledges on actual sexual behavior.

The national study shows that young women who take a virginity pledge are at least 40 percent less likely to have a child out of wedlock and 12 times more likely to be virgins when they marry, compared to young women who do not make such a pledge. The study concluded that public abstinence pledges made by teenagers still had an effect six years later. Those who make pledges are less likely to initiate sex and more likely to marry.

Despite the impressive declines over the past decade, the United States still has the highest rate of teen pregnancy and births in the industrialized world. In 1997, pregnant teens 17 years and younger cost the U.S. at least $7 billion annually in direct costs and an additional $8 billion indirectly according to information appearing in Kids Having Kids: Economic Costs and Social Consequences of Teen Pregnancy, published by the Urban Institute, Washington, D.C.

The Heritage Foundation relates out-of-wedlock births to significant social implications. Kirk Johnson, senior policy analyst, said, “Children raised by single parents are seven times more likely to live in poverty than are children raised in intact homes, and they are much more likely to be dependent on welfare programs and to suffer from a wide range of other social maladies.”