July 23--A possible upside to teens being eternally tethered to their devices? They're having a lot less sex than they used to.
A new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report says from 2011 to 2013, 44 percent of females ages 15 to 19 and 47 percent of males ages 15 to 19 had experienced sexual intercourse at least once.
That's a sharp decline from previous decades. In 1988, for example, 51 percent of female teens reported having had intercourse at least once, and 60 percent of male teens reported they had.
And they're all about that birth control, with 79 percent of female teens and 84 percent of male teens using contraception the first time they had intercourse, according to the report (percentages that have remained the same over time).
Teens who wait to have sexual intercourse for the first time until ages 18 or 19 are even more likely to use contraception. Ninety-three percent of female teens who postponed intercourse until their late teens used protection the first time, compared with 77 percent of females who were 17 or younger at their first encounter. Ninety-nine percent of males who first had intercourse at 18 or 19 used protection, compared with 82 percent who were 17 or younger.
At least one expert linked the decline in sexual intercourse to the HPV vaccine, an optional series of three shots administered to boys and girls as young as 11 to prevent genital warts and various cancers that can be caused by the human papillomavirus, including cervical cancer, anal cancer and vulvar cancer.
"The shots," The Washington Post points out, "come with an educational conversation. Kids learn earlier about the prevalence of STIs and how they're spread."
"They learn from doctors that you can catch HPV even if you use a condom," Brooke Bokor, an adolescent medicine specialist at the Children's National Health System, told the Post. "They might think: How else can I stay healthy?"
A decent (though disputed) number of teens are also hearing from their parents about sex, according to a survey of 2,000 parents and their teen children conducted in 2011, the beginning of the years mentioned in the CDC report.
Forty-two percent of parents said they've talked to their 15- to 18-year-old kids "many times" about abstaining from sex, but just 27 percent of teens said their parents have talked to them "many times." Forty-eight percent of parents reported talking to their teens about when sex should or shouldn't take place; 29 percent of teens agreed with that statement.
Perhaps the truth is somewhere in the middle.
One indisputable fact, reported in the CDC study, is that teen births have fallen 57 percent over the past three decades.
All in all, good news.
hstevens@tribpub.com
