Contemporary Sexuality - June 2008 - (Page 4)

New Twenties continued from page 1 “The decade of the twenties is much more experimental than three or four decades ago. People are experimenting with jobs, lifestyles and partners.” — William Galston this added emphasis. The reason for the move is centered on one central fact: While the teen pregnancy rate has dropped by more than one-third since 1991, unintended pregnancies haven’t decline among young adults. Between 1994 and 2001, unintended pregnancies remained unchanged among women aged 20-24 and increased 8 percent among women aged 25-29. “It’s an area no one was paying attention to,” said Bill Albert, chief program officer at the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. Unintended pregnancies Women in their twenties are more likely to become pregnant than their younger and older peers. Yet a high percentage of those pregnancies are unintended, according to National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) statistics reported by Lawrence B. Finer, PhD, and Stanley K. Henshaw, PhD, in a 2006 paper titled “Disparities in Rate of Unintended Pregnancy in the United States, 1994 and 2001,” published in the Perspectives of Sexual and Reproductive Health. Finer and Henshaw report the following data for 2001: • Among women aged 20-24, 174 per 1,000 became pregnant. • Among women aged 20-24, 60 percent of those pregnancies were unintended (about onehalf ended in abortion). • Among women aged 25-29, 168 per 1,000 became pregnant. • Among women aged 25-29, 43 percent of those pregnancies were unintended (about onehalf ended in abortion). “One in 20 American women has an unintended pregnancy each year and the burden falls even more heavily on some groups: women aged 18-24, low-income women, cohabitating women and minority (particularly black) women,” write Finer and Henshaw. In recent years, the federal government has emphasized marriage as way of decreasing unintended pregnancies and abortion. In 2003, the Office of Population Control announced several new goals for Title X — the government’s main family planning tool — including providing “extramarital abstinence education and counseling.” The goal was to “encourage abstinence outside a mutually monogamous marriage or union.” In 2006, the Bush administration began encouraging states to extend abstinence-only program to adults up to age 29. Possible target audiences for this message (as suggested by the government) are college students, “single adults involved in a local community or Bill Albert community-based organization” and “single parents in their twenties.” In “Sexual Behavior of Single Adult American Women,” by Laura Duberstein Lindberg, PhD, and Susheela Singh, PhD, published in the March 2008 issue of Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, the authors grapple with understanding this population. “In contrast to the intense public discussion and concern regarding adolescents’ sexual behavior and reproductive health needs, limited attention has been given to the sexual behavior of single adult women,” write Lindberg and Singh. “However, demographic shifts in the United States make the behavior and needs of this group increasingly salient.” The median age of first marriage continues to edge upward. In 1980, half of all Americans wed at age 22. By 2002, that figure stood at 25.3 years. Also in 2002, 40 percent of women aged 25-29 had never tied the knot. Previous studies hadn’t delved into the deep NSFG data set to mine numbers relating to the sexual activities of adult women. Lindberg and Singh did just that, examining the responses of 6,943 women (aged 20-44) from the 2002 survey, 7,216 from the 1995 survey and 9,451 from the 1988 survey. Lindberg and Singh uncovered the following data from the 2002 NSFG on whether women were sexually experienced (ever had vaginal intercourse), sexually active (intercourse in the past three months) and number of months of sexual activity (measured by diary entries of sexual activity per month): • Among single women aged 20-29, 82 percent were sexually experienced, 78.1 percent were sexually active and they were sexually active during 8.1 months during the previous year. • Among cohabitating women aged 20-29, 100 percent were sexually experienced, 96.0 percent were sexually active and they were sexually 4 Contemporary Sexuality www.aasect.org | June 2008 Vol. 42, No. 6 http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/psrh/full/4002708.pdf http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/psrh/full/4002708.pdf http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/3809006.pdf http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/3809006.pdf http://www.aasect.org

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Contemporary Sexuality - June 2008

Contemporary Sexuality - June 2008 Contents President’s Letter Member Spotlight Quick Hits: Sex in the News News of Members

Contemporary Sexuality - June 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.