Where you live has everything to do with when you’ll have sex for the first time. According to data from the National Center for Health Statistics, women in rural areas start having sexual intercourse at a younger age than those who reside in urban areas.
Researchers have dedicated years to looking at the education levels, income levels and other aspects of life between those who live in the two different areas.
The report found that women in rural areas have sex for the first time at 16.6 years old. The average is 17.4 years of age for women in urban settings. The data also indicates that women who have sex sooner are likely to get married at a younger age. Most of the data came from 10,096 women between the ages of 18 and 44 during 2011 and 2015.
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Sex starts younger in rural America
Of those surveyed, 51.2 percent in rural areas had sex by the time they were 16 compared to 41.7 percent in urban areas. By the age of 18, 79.6 percent of women living in rural areas had sexual intercourse, which is higher than the 68.6 percent of women living in urban regions.
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Not only does sex age differ based on what kind of area you live in, the kind of contraception used differs as well. For example, 25 percent of urban women use condoms or withdrawal as their main form of birth control; 23 percent use birth control pills, and 30 percent rely on intrauterine devices. Of rural women, 41 percent use intrauterine devices, 19 percent use condoms or withdrawal and 20 percent count on pills.
Despite rural women using more effective forms of birth control, their birth rates were higher; 69.7 percent of rural women had children compared to 58.4 percent in urban areas. And 41.6 percent of urbanites had no children compared to 30.3 percent of women in rural regions.
Regardless of where a person lives, it's great to hear that people are taking control of their sex and reproductive lives and taking advantage of the many types of contraception now available.