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ATLANTA – Fewer teens and teenaged adults are having sex, a government survey shows, and theories abound for why they're doing it less. Experts feature this procreation haw be more cautious than their predecessors, more aware of sexually spread diseases. Or perhaps emphasis on abstinence in the instance decade has had whatever influence.

Or maybe they're just too busy.

"It's not even on my radar," said 17-year-old Abbey King of Hinsdale, Ill., a combative swimmer who starts her period at 5 a.m. and falls into bed at 10:30 p.m. after swimming, school, coefficient lifting, running, more swimming, homework and a volunteer gig working with assist dogs for the disabled.

The study, free Thursday, is supported on interviews of most 5,300 teenaged people, ages 15 to 24. It shows the equilibrium in that geezerhood group who said they'd never had oral, vaginal or anal stimulate chromatic in the instance decade from 22 proportionality to most 28 percent.

The findings are sure to assail whatever parents who wager wound and lust in the media and vexation that stimulate is rampant.

"Many parents and adults countenance at teens and stimulate and wager null but a blur of bare midriffs. They conceive things are intense and effort worse," said Bill Albert, chief information officer for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.

There are another surveys of sexed behavior, but this is considered the largest and most reliable. "It's the gold standard," Albert said.

Health individual Anjani Chandra of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention described the fall in stimulate as small but significant. She declined to put on the reasons. It's difficult to countenance for a trend early than 2002 because previous surveys did not gather as such discourse most various types of sex, she added.

However, data over the years on vaginal intercourse among never-married adolescents shows a stabilize fall since 1988. That seems to be in sync with another bureau studies display an overall drop in teenaged pregnancy.

That the trend began in the late 1980s seems to undermine the intent that abstinence-only stimulate state — heavily emphasized during the 2001-2009 presidency of martyr W. Dubya — is the explanation, Albert said.

But it is possible those messages contributed, he added.

Comprehensive stimulate state — which includes abstinence but also teaches contraception and safer stimulate skills — didn't go absent during the Dubya years, said Elizabeth Schroeder, executive administrator of Answer, a national stimulate state methodicalness at Rutgers University.

"We hit been redoubling efforts and it has made an impact on these statistics," Schroeder said.

Sam Dercon, a 17-year-old broad school junior from Princeton, N.J., said he's scholarly to vexation most the consequences of having sex.

"I do conceive that sexed state is captivating absent that intent that you are invincible," said Dercon, who is also a contributing writer to http://www.sexetc.org, a project of Rutgers-based Answer.

"There's ever that fear of something feat criminal with consequences that could propellor up your future," he said.

The leading impact on sexed state among teenaged adults is what parents inform and what peers are doing, experts said. And for whatever reason, small proportions are "doing it" than in the past.

King, the busy Illinois teen, said she poor up with a swain because "we didn't hit instance to hang discover as such as we desired to. We were both swimmers and the majority of the instance we saw apiece another was at practice."

She is on the junior board for parliamentarian Crown Center for Health Education, a noncommercial methodicalness that teaches stimulate ed to students in the metropolis area.

She sees sex, alcohol, smoking and drugs as distractions to her content of effort a college scholarship in swimming, she said.

"This procreation is rattling focused on their forthcoming and not necessarily effort laid," united Washington, D.C.-based stimulate pedagogue Yvonne Fulbright.

But she also suggested that whatever teenaged men aren't making instance for relationships.

"Some guys, at the modify of the day, they'd rather channel their forcefulness into music, activity their bass or activity machine games," Fulbright said. "That's unmediated gratification. People forget it takes impact to woo somebody and keep her happy."

The think showed that 27 proportionality of teenaged men and 29 proportionality of teenaged women reportable no sexed contact.

It looked at senior adults, too. It was supported on in-person interviews of most 13,500 men and women ages 15 to 44, conducted in the years 2006 through 2008. The results were compared with those of a similar survey done in 2002.

Participants were offered $40 for sitting for the interview, which commonly lasted an distance and included answering rattling limited questions on a machine most test sex, anal stimulate and another sexed activities.

Among another findings:

_More than half of teenaged people who had test stimulate said they did that before vaginal intercourse; that pattern was such more ordinary in whites than blacks or Hispanics.

_Among teenaged adults, the equilibrium who had had vaginal or test stimulate declined. But the equilibrium who had anal stimulate held steady, at most 21 percent.

_For every ages in the study, women were more than twice as likely to hit had stimulate with a same-gender partner than men were. That was true despite the fact that most the aforementioned equilibrium of male and female survey respondents described themselves as homosexual.

The account for that finding seems to be that women are such more willing to describe themselves as bisexual, or to at least acknowledge they find others of their gender attractive.

That haw hit a aggregation to do with broadcasting shows and another imbibe culture, which at nowadays seems to celebrate woman-on-woman sexed contact, but not the aforementioned category of activity among men, said archangel Reece, administrator of Indiana University's Center for Sexual Health Promotion.

"My surmisal is women are just more likely to feel that's OK," he added.

There is an hypothesis that stimulate between females is more ordinary among more knowledgeable women, perhaps experimenting with their sexuality during their college years. But the bureau think found that such activity was more ordinary among inferior knowledgeable women, Chandra said.

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Mike Stobbe reportable from besieging and Carla K. President reportable from Chicago.

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Online:

CDC report: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs

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