Contraception and Pregnancy: Experience of Young Unmarried Women in the United States

We have previously described the sexual experience of unmarried U.S. teenagers based on interviews obtained in 1971 from a national sample of 4,611 young women 15-19 years of age.1 That article dealt largely with the sexual behavior of 2,839 white (i.e., nonblack) and 1,401 black never-married teenagers who, as a group, constitute 92 percent of the total sample (eight percent were or had been married). We found that about 28 percent of never-married young women aged 15-19 report having had sexual intercourse. This proportion rises from 14 percent at age 15 to 46 percent by age 19. (The proportion of teenagers who have premarital intercourse is higher, since about 60 percent of married teenagers report having had intercourse prior to marriage. Teenagers who come from poverty homes are not much more likely than their more affluent sisters to be sexually experienced. Faithful church attendance, rural background and a high level of confiding in parents are negatively associated with sexual experience. Migrant status and central city residence are associated positively with sexual experience. Socioeconomic factors are generally less significantly associated with sexual experience among whites than among blacks. We found that race ac-