Peer pressure may not be as persuasive as the silver rings being worn by a group of teens as a reminder of their pledge to wait until marriage to start having sex, reports ABC news.
According to the report, nearly 25,000 teens have taken the vow of chastity with the group, Silver Ring Thing.
The ring, worn like a wedding ring to symbolize their vow of chastity, is "a constant reminder on the young person's hand that they've actually made a decision about this," Silver Ring Thing founder Denny Pattyn told Good Morning America.
Kids "have a lot of information in their head, but that doesn't stop them in the back seat of a car," he said.
I've been wearing the ring for about 7 years now," ABC quoted DJ Shooter, a sophomore at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., who first slipped it on his finger at age 12, as saying. The football player said he and his girlfriend of four years agree sex is something to hold for marriage. He admits it's not always the easiest decision to uphold.
"There's a lot of times where you can kind of get caught up in the moment, a lot times I'll just kind of rub it or see it and it will remind me of the commitment that I made with my girlfriend," he said.
"I do get comments a lot, but they don't bother me," 16-year-old Jordan Payne was quoted as saying. "It made sense to me. I don't see a downside to waiting until you're married to have sex. You're healthy, you're disease free."
Silver Ring Thing is just one of several abstinence groups, among them the True Love Waits movement, which has singed up more than a million teens in the past decade. The Bush administration gave $120m to abstinence organisations last year.
But do these pledges stick? A Columbia University study of 12,000 teens found 88 percent of those who took an abstinence pledge had sex before marriage, ABC said. And those who did were 20 percent less likely to use a condom.
"I can't speak for other statistics. We have not been evaluated. And we believe if we were we would be shown to be very successful," said Pattyn, an ordained minister.
But as the BBC put it, 'here's the hub of the debate surrounding the abstinence movement in the US: is it a legitimate response to a clear medical danger, or is it a moral crusade, driven by a specific interpretation of Christian values?'
