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.

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 Conservative Digest attacked 'homosexuals and other perverts' and 'antifamily forces'; by Nabers Cabaniss, a favorite of far-right senators Denton, Jesse Helms, and Henry Hyde who at thirty boasted that she was the oldest virgin in Washington, D.C.; and by Cabaniss's erstwhile boyfriend William Reynolds 'Ren' Archer III, who as a bachelor confided to a reporter that he had had sex once but didn't much like it.

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, Wake Up Little Susie (New York: Routledge, 1992).

27. Kendrick v. Bowen (Civil A. No. 83-3175), 'Federal Supplement,' 1548. Patricia Donovan, 'The Adolescent Family Life Act and the Promotion of Religious Doctrine,' Family Planning Perspectives 4, no. 4 (September/October 1984): 222.

28. The anti-ERA Illinois Committee on the Status of Women received grants of over $600,000 to develop and evaluate the workbook Sex Respect (ACLU 'Kendrick I,' List of Grantees), authored by former Catholic schoolteacher and anti-abortion activist Colleen Kelly Mast, and another $350,000 for Facing Reality, the workbook of its companion curriculum (Teaching Fear: The Religious Right's Campaign against Sexuality Education [Washington, D.C.: People for the American Way, June 1994], 10). Sex Respect was denounced for its inaccuracies and omissions, ridiculed for its sloganeering ('Pet Your Dog, Not Your Date'), and scorned for its antisexual moralism ('There's no way to have premarital sex without hurting someone'). Yet in 1988 the U.S. Department of Education put the curriculum on its list of recommended AIDS education videos, replacing one by the Red Cross. The next year, after former committee vice-president, then state representative Penny Pullen sponsored legislation requiring abstinence education in Illinois public schools, Sex Respect was awarded state contracts worth more than $700,000 (Teaching Fear, 10).

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,' New York Times, May 8, 1997, 22.

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,' SIECUS Reports 24, no. 6, (August/September 1996), 5.

31. Teaching Fear, 11.

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.

33. U.S. Senate, Jeremiah Denton, Adolescent Family Life, S. Rept. 97-161, July 8, 1981, 2; emphasis added.

34. 'To Attack the Problems of Adolescent Sexuality,' New York Times, June 15, 1981, A22.

35. 'To Attack the Problems of Adolescent Sexuality.'

36. A few years earlier, the Family Protection Act (H.R. 7955), a blueprint of the Right's agenda to come and also cosponsored by Hatch, proposed defunding all state protections of children and women independent of their fathers and husbands, including child-abuse and domestic-abuse programs. It did not pass.