"just say no"

Scholars at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health studied teens who took the virginity pledge (i.e., no sex before marriage) and compared them to other teens who didn't. They chose non-pledging teens with the same characteristics as the pledgers - religious, and similar attitudes about sex and other things.

And the results? The kids who just said no were just as likely to have premarital sex as the kids who didn't take a pledge.

That's too bad, right? It gets worse.

The pledge kids were significantly less likely to use condoms or other sorts of birth control than their similar but non-pledged counterparts.

So to sum it up... Asking kids to just say no makes no difference on whether they decide to do the horizontal bop before marriage. And it makes them more likely to risk disease and pregnancy by foregoing condoms.

Because condoms imply planning and it's one thing to give into those teenage hormones in the heat of the moment to do the nasty - but it's something else when you think far enough ahead to actually get some rubbers.