24. For surgeon general, Reagan nominated Everett Koop, who had appeared in an anti-abortion propaganda video standing in a field of dead fetuses. But Koop turned out not to be the antichoice puppet the Right to Life had hoped for. Keeping his views on abortion to himself, he became a tireless crusader for frank AIDS education. Richard Schweiker, also staunchly antichoice and not too hot for a federal role in education or welfare either, was appointed secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. To run that department's three-year-old Office of Adolescent Pregnancy Programs, the administration recruited Marjory Mecklenberg, a Minnesota Right to Life activist widely regarded as an unqualified hard-liner for "family values" and against nonmarital sex, which seemed to be a prerequisite for top positions in that office. It would later be occupied by Jo Ann Gasper, whose column in
25. "Block-granting" Title X into the Maternal and Child Health Bureau had been proposed during the Nixon administration too but failed.
26. African American communities had always kept such babies close to home. And by 1981, as birth mothers began to come forward and express the pain and coercion of their decisions and adopted children started looking for those birth mothers, white girls were also thinking twice about relinquishing maternal rights. Ricki Solinger,
27.
28. The anti-ERA Illinois Committee on the Status of Women received grants of over $600,000 to develop and evaluate the workbook
29. This figure has also been cited for the number of school districts employing any abstinence-only curriculum. "States Slow to Take U.S. Aid to Teach Sexual Abstinence,"
30. During that time, the average grant for other organizations the size of Teen-Aid or Respect Inc. was less than half of Teen-Aid's and less than a third of Respect's. Department of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, "Adolescent Family Life Demonstration Grants Amounts Awarded 1982-1996," Office of Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention document, Washington, D.C., 1996. Teen-Aid did not use the free startup money to reduce its prices to future customers. In Duval County, Florida, one of the people who sued in the mid-1990s to stop the schools from teaching Teen-Aid's "Me, My World, My Future" because of its inaccuracies and its biases against abortion, women and girls, gays, and "any kind of family that isn't mommy, daddy, and children" said, "The new curriculum [is] going to save the school system huge amounts of money. [With Teen-Aid], we had to buy $100,000 worth of supplies a year." "In Duval County, Florida: Reflecting on a Legal Battle for Comprehensive Sexuality Education,"
31.
32. The statistics available at the time from the institute were that about 780,000, or 39 percent, of 2 million then-fourteen-year-old girls would have at least one pregnancy in their teen years; 420,000 would give birth; 300,000 would have abortions.