Nearly everyone in the US has sex before marriage, a new survey shows.

And contrary to popular belief, chastity before one’s wedding day was a rarity in the 1950s and early ‘60s, too. “I think probably many of them weren’t talking about it, but certainly some of them were doing it,” Dr. Lawrence Finer of The Guttmacher Institute in New York City, the study’s author, told Reuters Health.

Finer was prompted to do the study by increasingly widespread public and private efforts to promote abstinence until marriage. “Our motivation,” he said, “was to say - is this a goal that can realistically be achieved; does this approach make sense?”

To investigate, he analyzed the results of four waves of the National Survey of Family Growth conducted between 1982 and 2002, including a total of 39,837 men and women.

Among people surveyed in 2002, 75 percent reported having had sex before marriage by age 20, while 93 percent had done so by age 30 and 95 percent had by age 40.

Premarital sex at a relatively young age was less common among older people; for example, 48 percent of women who reached age 15 between 1954 and 1963 reported having had premarital sex by age 20, compared to 64 percent of women who turned 15 in 1964-1973, 72 percent of women who turned 15 in 1974-1983, and 76 percent of women who turned 15 in 1984-1993.

But by age 40, Finer found, 85 percent of the oldest women in the study reported having had premarital or non-marital sex.

The survey also showed that the age that people had sex for the first time fell from 20.4 for women who turned 15 in 1954-1963 to 17.3 for those who turned 15 in 1984-1993, and then increased slightly to 17.6 for people turning 15 in 1994-2003.

What makes abstinence until marriage efforts more difficult, Finer noted, is that people are getting married later than they used to, and more and more people are choosing not to marry at all.

“Evidence from the past 50 years suggests that establishing abstinence until marriage as normative behavior is a challenging goal,” Finer concludes in his report.

“These findings argue for education and interventions that provide young people with the skills and information they need to protect themselves from unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases once they become sexually active.”

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SOURCE: Public Health Reports, January-February 2007.