16. Sol Gordon, You: The Psychology of Surviving and Enhancing Your Social Life, Love Life, Sex Life, School Life, Home Life, Work Life, Emotional Life, Creative Life, Spiritual Life, Style of Life Life (New York: Times Books, 1975).
17. In 1972, worried that young single women's kids would end up on the dole, Congress required all welfare departments to offer birth control services to minors. The Supreme Court ruled in Carey v. Population Services International (1977) that teens had a privacy right to purchase contraception; in 1977 and 1979, when Congress reauthorized Title X of the Public Health Services Act of 1970, providing health care to the poor, it singled out adolescents as a specific group in need of contraceptive services. In 1978, partly in reaction to the Guttmacher Report, Senator Edward Kennedy's Adolescent Health Services and Pregnancy Prevention and Care Act set up the Office of Adolescent Pregnancy Programs at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (later Health and Human Services). Its mandate was to administer "comprehensive [reproductive] services" to teens (Luker, Dubious Conceptions, 69). On the books, the government seemed to care about the reproductive and social health of teenagers, but the budget belied real commitment. No new funds were slated for the younger Title X clients, who would number as many as half the visitors to some birth control clinics in coming years. The Kennedy program, proposed at fifty million dollars in the first year, got only one million dollars; in its third and final year, it reached just ten million dollars and extended grants to fewer than three dozen programs nationwide.
18. Guttmacher Report, quoted in Constance A. Nathanson, Dangerous Passages: The Social Control of Sexuality in Women's Adolescence (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 47.
19. The history of family planning and concomitant legislation before the Adolescent Family Life Act draws from Nathanson, Dangerous Passages; Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, Abortion and Women's Choice: The State, Sexuality, and Reproductive Freedom, rev. ed. (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990); and Luker, Dubious Conceptions, as well as interviews with birth control professionals, lawyers, and women's movement activists from the 1970s and 1980s.
20. Alan Guttmacher Institute, Sex and America's Teenagers (New York: the institute, 1994), 58. Luker notes that many are also discouraged at school or already dropouts and that motherhood does not diminish such a young woman's standard of living: they are poor when they have children, and they stay poor (Luker, Dubious Conceptions, 106-8). Sociologist Arline Geronimus had argued that for some young women early childbearing is a rational choice, the best of several not-so-great options. A girl can stay in school and take advantage of school-based day care; families more readily help young mothers with babysitting and financial support than older ones; and, when Junior heads off to kindergarten, a younger mom has plenty of years to recover missed opportunities. Besides, for the young women "at risk," babies add love, meaning, and structure to otherwise fairly stripped-down lives. Arline T. Geronimus and Sanders Korenman, "The Socioeconomic Consequences of Teen Childbearing Reconsidered," Quarterly Journal of Economics (November 1992): 1187-214. Teenage men, especially those who are alienated from school and pessimistic about their work prospects, feel just as affirmed by fatherhood as their girlfriends do by motherhood. William Marsigho and Constance L. Shehan, "Adolescent Males' Abortion Attitudes: Data from a National Survey," Family Planning Perspectives 25 (July/August 1993): 163.
21. This number represented about 50 percent of the fifteen- to nineteen-year-olds, the same percentage who are now sexually active. Alan Guttmacher Institute, Eleven Million Teenagers: What Can Be Done about the Epidemic of Adolescent Pregnancies in the United States (New York: Planned Parenthood Federation on America, 1976), 9-11.
22. Nathanson, Dangerous Passages, 60.
23. Luker, Dubious Conceptions, 8.