Pledge takers are as likely to have sex before getting hitched as other youngsters who don’t vow abstinence, a new study suggests.

Janet Rosenbaum, Ph.D., of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, looked at data used in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. In this survey, carried out in 1995 and 1996, middle and high school students were asked about their sexual behaviors and judgments.

"Previous studies found that pledgers were more likely to delay having sex than non-pledgers," Rosenbaum said. "I used the same data as previous studies but a different statistical method." She compared 289 teens who were 17 years old on average in 1996, when they pledged to remain virgin, with 645 who didn’t vow abstinence but were otherwise similar.

What the findings disclosed is that taking a virginity pledge “doesn’t seem to make any difference at all in any sexual behavior,” according to Rosenbaum. 82 percent of high school students who had vowed not to have sex before marriage had taken their promise in the end. Besides, there was little difference in the number of participants in both groups who had lost their virginity, the age at which it happened or their number of sexual partners, researchers said.

The study, published in the journal Pediatrics, also revealed that the percentage of adolescents who used condoms or birth control pills when they do started having sex was 10 points lower for those who had vowed to remain virgin.