Compulsory Motherhood
Abstinence education is the good cop of conservative “family planning” by which human relations are restored to what the Right views as a “traditional” structure (Dad on top, Mom next, kids below that) and sex to its “traditional” function, procreation. But if a teen cannot be persuaded to tarry in celibate, parent-controlled childhood and insists on being both young and sexual, the Right has a bad cop. Its job is to barricade the option of abortion. This imposes a sentence of immediate and irrevocable adulthood on any “child” who crosses the sexual line and makes a mistake. Compulsory motherhood can be effected in two ways, legally and culturally.
On the legal front, the anti-abortion movement has had a mixed record, with many of its initiatives found unconstitutional. Nevertheless, its record over nearly thirty years shows a dogged climb toward success. Almost from the moment the Supreme Court legalized abortion in Roe v. Wade in 1973, lobbyists and activists have kept up a steady presence in every legislative chamber, including Congress. Only four years after the ruling, President Jimmy Carter signed the Hyde Amendment prohibiting federal Medicaid funding for abortion, which hit the youngest and poorest women—who also happened to be women of color—especially hard.1
When they aren’t walking the statehouse halls, anti-abortion activists are on the pavements, outside the clinics, shouting and praying. Their protests are not always lawful. From 1993 to 1997, the Justice Department recorded more than fifty bombings and arson attacks on abortion clinics,5 and from 1993 to 1999, seven people, including clinic workers and doctors, were killed by anti-abortion terrorism.6
In spite of significant increase in expense, danger, and worry that their laws have exacted on young women seeking abortions, antichoicers have not achieved their main goal: to stop teen sex and abortions. Studies in the 1990s showed that the majority of girls throughout the world have sex in their teens,7 and, while abortion rates are dropping, primarily because of increased use of condoms to prevent HIV transmission, American teens still get abortions at almost the rate they did just after Roe;8 women under twenty are involved in about 30 percent of all surgically terminated pregnancies.9 Moreover, women continue to procure abortions at strikingly similar rates worldwide, whether or not the procedure is legal10—Just like American women before Roe, who put their lives in the hands of barbers and gangsters to terminate unwanted pregnancies. (In the 1950s, illegal abortions killed an estimated five thousand to ten thousand women a year.)11 In most developed countries, the surgical termination of a pregnancy is a legal, normal part of women’s reproductive lives.
Even opponents against abortion have abortions. According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, “Catholic women have an abortion rate 29% higher than Protestant women, and one in five women having abortions are born-again or Evangelical Christians.”12
If kids are learning about abortion in school sex ed at all, they learn that it is a bad thing. The 1995 survey of state laws on sexuality education conducted by the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) found that only nine states specifically named abortion in their sex-ed statutes. Of these, only Vermont required giving students neutral information on the procedure; the others either forbade teachers from talking about abortion as a reproductive health method or allowed discussing its negative consequences only.25 In the quarter of American school districts that “Sex Respect” purportedly reaches, kids learn that abortion means “killing the baby” and its risks include “guilt, depression, anxiety,” as well as “heavy blood loss, infection, and puncturing of the uterus.”26 In fact, after Roe, abortion’s risks plummeted, with 0.3 deaths per 100,000 abortions. In 1990, pregnancy termination carried one-eleventh the risk of childbirth, one-half the risk of tonsillectomy, and one thousandth that of a shot of penicillin.27
Programs for boys, finally understood as the missing link in sexual responsibility, often instruct teens in birth control methods, but especially those aimed at inner-city youth zoom right past abortion to put the emphasis on marriage and fatherhood. With cozy names like Dads Make A Difference, these programs transmit the warning, If you’re going to have sex, get ready to support a baby. While this might be the right message to young couples who choose to have a child, it assumes they will make that choice, especially if they are poor, black, or Latino. Statistics bear out this assumption: Whereas almost three-quarters of higher-income teenagers who get pregnant have abortions so they can go to college, establish a career, and marry before having children, teenagers from poorer families with narrower prospects have less incentive to delay starting a family. So only 39 percent of poor and 54 percent of low-income adolescents terminate unplanned pregnancies.32 Still, the propaganda aimed at young men jumps too quickly to the conclusion that, because poor teens are likely to have the children they conceive, they therefore want to conceive them and therefore must be dissuaded of that desire. Hector Sanchez-Flores, who runs Spirit of Manhood, a program for young Chicano men in San Francisco, refuted this notion soundly. At a Planned Parenthood conference in 1998, he reported that fully three-quarters of the guys in his program did not want their partner to get pregnant, and four out of five wanted to share responsibility for contraception.
If it is curious that comprehensive sex educators, almost universally pro-choice, have seemed willing to throw abortion overboard, perhaps there’s an unspoken reason. Besides the bigger holes bored by the Right, there is another, less visible leak in their boat. As we saw in chapter 5, by the 1990s the comprehensives were engaged in a contest to be the best at preventing teen sex, not preventing unwanted pregnancies or unwanted children. In such an atmosphere, a call for abortion is almost an admission of defeat.
As of 1999, parental notification or consent laws were in effect in forty states. Two thirds of girls talk voluntarily to their mothers or fathers before choosing to end a pregnancy, and even more than that percentage of parents are supportive.37 But girls who do not inform their mothers or fathers usually have good reason: many have already experienced violence at home and, when they tell, are met with more.38 Parental notification statutes do not increase communication, as they are meant to do. Rather, they greatly increase the risks to the pregnant young women by delaying their abortions.40 In all, the American Medical Association reported in 1993 that “minors may be driven to desperate measures” by such laws. “The desire to maintain secrecy has been one of the leading reasons for illegal abortions since 1973.”41
In the summer of 1998, legislation was introduced in Congress making it a federal crime to take a minor across state lines, from a parental-consent state to one without that regulation, to get an abortion. Sponsors heard testimony from public health professionals who called the bill “harmful and potentially dangerous” and from Karen and Bill Bell, an Indiana couple whose daughter, Becky, had died from complications of a back-alley abortion because she was abashed to tell them of her situation.44 Promoters touted the bill as a child-protective measure anyway,45 but the name of the proposed law, the Child Custody Protection Act, unwittingly revealed its real intent. The bill, which passed the House in 1998 and 1999, would protect not the child but custody itself. When abortion is involved, the bill’s authors implied, the life of a pregnant girl is less valuable than an abstraction called the family.
Without abortion, the narrative of teenage desire is strangely, and artificially, unmoored from modern social reality. Instead of sound policy, the anti-abortion movement has rewritten a premodern parable, in which fate tumbles to worse fate, sin is chastised, and sex is the ruination of mother, child, and society.
Desperate girls, including middle-class high schoolers with every opportunity before them, hide their pregnancies, give birth in hotel rooms, then swaddle their babies in Hefty bags, alive or not, in closets and Dumpsters. For these young women, “getting caught,” both as sexual beings and as dumb-luck mothers, is fraught with shame and denial. Abortion has moved beyond the pale, a terrible secret worse than any imaginable fate. For these teenagers, there are no reproductive “options” at all.
1 – Marlene Gerber Fried, “Abortion in the U.S.: Barriers to Access,” Reproductive Health Matters 9 (May 1997): 37-45.
5 – Rick Bragg, “Abortion Clinic Hit by 2 Bombs; Six are Injured,” New York Times, January 17, 1997.
6 – Jim Yardley and David Rohde, “Abortion Doctor in Buffalo Slain; Sniper Attack Fits Violent Pattern,” New York Times, October 25, 1998, A1.
7 – Alan Guttmacher Institute, “Into a New World: Young Women’s Sexual and Reproductive Lives,” Executive Summary (New York: the institute, 1988).
8 – Stanley K. Henshaw and Kathyrn Kost, “Abortion Patients in 1994-1995: Characteristics and Contraceptive Use,” Family Planning Perspectives 28 (1996): 140-47, 158.
9 – Robert Pear, “Provisions on Youth Health Insurance Would Sharply Limit Access to Abortion,” New York Times, July 3, 1997.
10 – Alan Guttmacher Institute News, January 21, 1999.
11 – Lawrence Lader, Abortion (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), 64-74; Kristin Lurker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 48-49; Brett Harvey, The Fifties: A Women’s Oral History (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), 24.
12 – “Abortion Common among All Women Even Those Thought to Oppose Abortion,” Alan Guttmacher Institute press release, 1996.
25 – “Sexuality Education in America: A State-by-State Review,” National Abortion Rights Action League report, Washington, D.C., 1995.
26 – Sex Respect Student Workbook, 95.
27 – On the tonsillectomy comparison, see “Safety of Abortion,” National Abortion Rights Action League fact sheet, Washington, D.C., undated, received 1998; Review of Fear-Based Programs, SEICUS Community Action Kit, 1994: 6. On the shot of penicillin comparison, see Margie Kelly, “Legalized Abortion: A Public Health Success Story,” Reproductive Freedom News (June 1999): 7.
32 – Alan Guttmacher Institute, “Teenage Pregnancy and the Welfare Reform Debate,” Issues in Brief (Washington, D.C.: the institute, 1995).
37 – Margaret C. Crosby and Abigail English, “Should Parental Consent to or Notification of an Adolescent’s Abortion Be Required By Law? No”; Everett L. Worthington, “Should Parental Consent . . . ? Yes”; both in Debating Children’s Lives: Current Controversies on Children and Adolescents, ed. Mary Ann Mason and Eileen Gambrill (Thousand Oaks, Calif., Sage Publications, 1994), 143 and 133.
38 – Crosby and English, “Should Parental Consent . . . ? No,” 143.
40 – “Induced Termination of Pregnancy before and after Roe v. Wade, Trends in the Mortality and Morbidity of Women,” Journal of the American Medical Association 268, no. 22 (December 1993): 3238.
41 – American Medical Association, Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs, “Mandatory Parental Consent to Abortion,” Journal of the American Medical Association 269, no. 1 (January 6, 1993): 83.
44 – “Debate Continues on Child Custody Protection Act,” Reproductive Freedom News 7, no. 5 (June 1, 1998): 3-4; “Women’s Stories: Becky Bell,” National Abortion Rights Action League report, Washington D.C., undated.
45 – Alvarez, “GOP Bill.”
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