Los Angeles Times (LT) - SATURDAY January 5, 1991
MARLENE CIMONS; TIMES STAFF WRITER

By 1988, 51.5% of women ages 15 to 19 said they had engaged in premarital sex by their late teens--nearly double the 28.6% reported in 1970, according to a new survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control.

"Among the 9 million adolescent women in 1988, almost 4.9 million (52%) may have had premarital sexual intercourse," the CDC said in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

Further, from 1985 through 1988, the proportion of teen-age women reporting sexual activity increased 7.4 points, or approximately one-third of the increase among adolescent women reported for the entire period surveyed, 1970-1988, the CDC said. This occurred after 15 years of a steady decline in the rate of increase, the agency said.

CDC officials said they had long been aware of the trend of increasing sexual activity among teen-age girls but were surprised at the leap since 1985.

"This is really important because it happened during a time when we thought we were doing so much in terms of health education and AIDS prevention," said Sevgi Aral, chief of the behavioral studies section of the CDC's division that deals with prevention of sexually transmitted diseases. "Somehow we are not getting our behavioral messages across effectively. That's the startling part."

The largest relative increase occurred among those 15 years of age. In 1970, only 4.6% of 15-year-olds said they had had premarital sex, compared to 25.6% in 1988, the CDC said.

For 18-year-olds, the increase was from 39.4% in 1970 to 69.5% in 1988, the CDC said. For 19-year-olds, the figures were 48.2% in 1970 and 75.3% in 1988, the CDC said.

Aral said that the consequences of early sexual activity could be especially harmful for teen-age girls, particularly since they have higher rates of sexually transmitted diseases than older people.

"The adolescent woman who gets an STD (sexually transmitted disease) suffers the worst consequences," she said. "They are the ones who develop the unwanted complications, which include PID (pelvic inflammatory disease) which can lead to sterility and ectopic pregnancy. And, of course, ectopic pregnancy can be fatal."

More than 1 million women annually suffer a bout of pelvic inflammatory disease, she said, and "we estimate that between 16-20% of those PID episodes are occurring among teen-agers."

Further, there are 2.5 million cases of sexually transmitted diseases among teen-agers annually and 1 million pregnancies, according to Lloyd Kolbe, director of CDC's division of adolescent and school health.

Part of the problem, he said, is that "schools in the United States have not been very sophisticated in implementing programs designed to help young people avoid sexual intercourse.

"In the past, if our programs weren't effective, teen-agers would become infected with STDs or become pregnant," he said. "That was a problem, but it wasn't necessarily life-threatening. But if they get infected with HIV, they're going to die. We need to launch a more intensive and sustained effort to get teen-agers to abstain from sexual intercourse while they are in high school, and, if they're not going to abstain, to practice behaviors that reduce their risk of infection."

Pam Houghton-Denniston, a spokeswoman for the private Center for Populations Options, said the CDC figures were consistent with data gathered by her organization.

"I would say that from the messages teen-agers are receiving from the media (about sexuality) and from commercial efforts to sell products, that it's not surprising," she said. "Also, teen-agers are maturing earlier. Our basic concern is that those teen-agers who are sexually active be protected against the risks of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV."

The proportion of black adolescents who reported having had premarital sexual intercourse was "consistently higher" than the proportion of white adolescents, the CDC said. However, "the difference narrowed substantially over time because of a greater relative increase (of sexual experience) among white adolescents," which was 24 percentage points among whites, compared with 13 percentage points among blacks, the agency said.

For white adolescents, "this represents an increase in the number of sexually experienced females from 2.2 million in 1970 to 3.7 million in 1988," CDC said. For black adolescents, it represents an increase from 600,000 to 800,00, CDC said.

In 1988, "adolescents who had had sexual intercourse earlier in life reported greater numbers of sex partners," the CDC said. Among 15- to 24-year-olds who initiated sexual intercourse before age 18, 75% reported having had two or more partners, and 45% reported having had four or more partners, CDC said.

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