Helping teenagers postpone sexual involvement

In 1983, the Henry W. Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta began a family planning-based outreach program for eighth graders in a local school system. The program is led by older teenagers and focuses on helping students resist peer and social pressures to initiate sexual activity. Evaluation of the program, based on telephone interviews with 536 students from the hospital's low-income population, revealed that among students who had not had sexual intercourse, those who participated in the program were significantly more likely to continue to postpone sexual activity through the end of the ninth grade than were similar students who did not participate in the program. Because of their lower rate of sexual activity, program students also experienced comparatively fewer pregnancies than no-program students.