Other Reasons to Hold Our Values

Casual sex can never be what God intended the sexual relationship to be.
There's no medical or psychological evidence that posponing sexual intercourse causes any lasting physical or emotional harm to males or females.
The danger of AIDS and other sexually transmitted disease are very real. Because many STDs exhibit no outward symptoms, an infected person may be unaware, but contagious, nevertheless. The AIDS virus can incubate for more than 10 years before the infected individual tests positive, yet that person can transmit the virus all along.
When two people have intercourse, each also is, in a sense, having sex with every other sexual partner in the other's life. So the more sexual contact one has, the higher the risk of contacting an STD.
There is no absolutely safe period when a female can be assured of not becoming pregnant. Just one occurence would already be too much for a girl.
Other than abstinence, there is no 100 percent foolproof method of birth control, even when directions are followed correctly.
Teenage mothers and their babies are much more likely to experience health complications. The younger the mother, the greater the hazard.
Babies born to teenage mothers are two to three times as likely to die during the first year. Lifelong, such children more often display lower intellectual and academic achievement, plus problems of self-control and social behavior.
Teenage mothers often spend their lives on welfare. A large portion of the federal budget for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program goes to households where the mother gave birth in her teens.
Women who become mothers in their teen years are likely to have jobs with less status, lower incomes, and less satisfaction all through their lives.
People who become parents during their teens may be more likely to become child abusers, perhaps because of resentment over what they've missed.
80 percent of teenage marriages end in divorce within five years.

Take a look at the chilling statistics below:

STDs infect three million teenagers annually.
1.3 million new cases of gonorrhea occur annually; strains of gonorrhea have developed that are resistant to penicillin.
It's estimated that every year from 60,000 to 100,000 young American women are made sterile by the HIV virus, gonorrhea, or chlamydia: most are unaware that they have the disease.
The infection rate for chlamydia is highest among girls 15 to 19.
As many as a third of sexually active teenagers have genital warts.
The AIDS rate among teenagers is climbing, and because of the long incubation period, almost certainly many teens are infected and unaware.
Each year more than one million teenage girls in the U.S. become pregnant—one in nine women ages 15 to 19 and one in five who are sexually active.
Each year more than 500,000 U.S. teenage females will carry their babies to term. More than 400,000 young women under the age of 20 will have an abortion. Approximately 14 percent of teenage pregnancies will end in miscarriage.
Within a year, almost one in five will become pregnant again. More than 31 percent will become pregnant a second time within two years.
More than 90 of every 100 unwed U.S. teen mothers choose to parent their infants, usually with little social stigma attached.

Note

^{Most
of these points were taken from:

Lenore Buth, How
to Talk Confidently with Your Child about Sex (St. Louis: Concordia,
1998), 91-92.}

Choose Abstinence!

If you have chosen premarital sexual abstinence, please sign the guestbook to encourage others who have committed themselves to abstain from sex until marriage. The purpose is to tell you [and others] that you are not alone. :)