“Premarital sex is normal behavior for the vast majority of Americans, and has been for decades,” says Lawrence Finer after releasing a study in the new issue of Public Health Report. This shows that 95 percent of Americans have had sex before marriage.

Finer is a research director at the Guttmacher Institute, a private New York-based think tank that studies sexual and reproductive issues. The study is based on interviews of more than 38,000 people, conducted since the eighties.

Even among a subgroup of those who abstained from sex until at least age 20, four-fifths had had premarital sex by age 44, the study found.

According to Finer, Americans has had sex before marriage at the same rate since the 1950s and women have been as likely as men to engage in premarital sex.

Among women born between 1950 and 1978, at least 91 percent had had premarital sex by age 30, he said, while among those born in the 1940s, 88 percent had done so by age 44. “The data clearly show that the majority of older teens and adults have already had sex before marriage, which calls into question the federal government’s funding of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs for 12- to 29-year-olds,” Finer said.

Quotes are borrowed from ‘Most Americans Have Had Premarital Sex’ on Newsday.com.