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This Many Young Moms Say They're Virgins

by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

So here's your random and fascinating fact for today: Nearly one percent of young American mothers believe they had babies by immaculate conception (or at least that's their story and they're sticking to it). Researchers surveyed more than 7,800 women ages 15 to 28 and found that about one in 200 Gen Y moms say they were virgins at the time they gave birth.

The results — published in the British Medical Journal under the title "Like a Virgin (Mother)" — come from the long-running National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which began tracking 12 to 18-year-old girls in the 1994-95 school year. Of the group, 5,340 women became pregnant, including 45 (0.8 percent of pregnant women) who report that they conceived without having sex or IVF.

Although these "virgin pregnancies" were relatively rare, the phenomenon was more common among women who signed chastity pledges or whose parents "indicated lower levels of communication with their children about sex and birth control," the study authors point out. About a third of the self-reported virgin moms had signed chastity pledges, compared to 15 percent of the general group.

So are we looking at a lot of Mommy-of-Messiah complexes here? "While more virgins gave birth to boys (59.8 percent) or may have learnt they were pregnant during Advent, these trends did not reach statistical significance," the researchers note.