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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] Hyde's first fatality was Rosie Jimenez, a twenty-seven-year-old single Texan mother receiving welfare and Medicaid while working in an electronics factory and going to college part time. She died after an illegal abortion, with a seven-hundred-dollar scholarship check in her pocket, having chosen her education over paying for a legal procedure. ^[*2]

By 2001, thirty-two states required parental involvement, either notification or consent, in a minor's getting an abortion ^[*3] 

(in one of the last holdouts, Vermont, a Republican takeover of the House of Representatives released a bill from the committee where it had been locked up by Democrats for a decade). 

That year, the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional Nebraska's law prohibiting so-called partial-birth abortion by a slim five-to-four majority, but anti-abortionists went immediately back to work in the states to craft legislation that would pass constitutional muster. The next Supreme Court appointment, which is likely to occur during the anti-choice George W. Bush administration, could bring the fragile edifice of abortion rights down.

When they aren't walking the statehouse halls, anti-abortion activists are on the pavements, outside the clinics, shouting and praying. ^[*4]  Their protests are not always lawful. From 1993 to 1997, the Justice Department recorded more than fifty bombings and arson attacks at abortion clinics, ^[*5] and from 1993 to 1999, seven people, including clinic workers and doctors, were killed by anti-abortion terrorism. ^[*6] 

Still, considering the amount of clamor it raised, the anti-choice movement has achieved a monumental, and paradoxical, triumph in the decades after Roe: it has wrought a near-total public silence on the subject of abortion in the discourse of teen sex.

Moral Rights 

In spite of the significant increases in expense, danger, and worry that their laws have exacted on young women seeking abortions; anti-choicers 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

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such good Chardonnay' abortions" and extolled feminists to reconsider abortion within the "paradigm of sin and redemption." ^[*16]  At a clinic in Texas, where the Christian "crisis pregnancy center" opened next door and Right-to-Lifers held prayer vigils almost daily, journalist Debbie Nathan observed besieged front-line workers succumbing to a kind of Stockholm syndrome, adopting their captors' doubts as to whether abortion was such a great idea after all.

The Australian pro-abortion activist Marge Ripper called this new tone the "awfulisation of abortion." Under its influence, abortion's proponents become its apologists, espousing the arguments of their antagonists, slightly softened: abortion is an evil, though a "necessary evil." It is a deeply private "family" affair and never preferable to contraception. 

As the journalist Janet Hadley commented, this last argument implies, incorrectly, that contraception is always reliable and "safe," as opposed to abortion, which is not. This makes contraception the "responsible" option and abortion therefore "irresponsible." ^[*17]  

(In fact, according to a study by the Alan Guttmacher Institute published in 1996, six in ten abortion patients had been using contraception, but it failed.) ^[*18]  

As early as 1980, American pro-choice feminists started to cast themselves as "pro-family," some even implying that if the state provided good child and health care, everyone would want babies, and abortion would become obsolete.

By the 1990s, the pro-choice lawyers were still in court, the doctors were taking the bullets. But few advocates of choice seemed willing to defend the ethical position for abortion itself -- as complex as any serious ethical position -- that women's right to terminate a pregnancy is a moral good. Few argued that women's right to control fertility, the biological handicap of the female sex, amounts to full existential equality with men; and that the use of one's body against one's will amounts to nothing less than slavery. The only moral argument for choice was made on children's behalf: that wanted children fare better in the world, which is already overpopulated with hungry, neglected, and abused kids. ^[*19] 

Liberal Hollywood sure isn't defending choice. Pregnancy panics have long been melodramatic staples, for their obvious tear-jerking potential, and so, for dramatic resolution purposes, are false alarms and miscarriages. But if a pregnancy lasts on screen, abortion is never an option and always a tragedy. Indeed, the A-word is rarely even uttered. 

On Beverly Hills 90210, a young woman and

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her doubts were "probably planted in my mind by the anti-choice fascists." She suspected she was being brainwashed to feel guilty, in other words. But she felt guilty all the same.

The little quantitative research on the subject suggests that these girls' feelings are widespread. In the early 1990s, Rebecca Stone and Cynthia Waszak ran focus groups on abortion with thirteen- to nineteen-year-olds. On the whole, the youngsters expressed 

"erroneous and anecdotal evidence about abortion more often than sound knowledge, portraying the procedure as medically dangerous, emotionally damaging, and widely illegal." 

The source of this information, said the researchers, was largely anti-abortion propaganda, which was abundant and often targeted expressly at suggestible teens. Pro-choice opinions, they believed, were less widely propagated and less likely to be pointed directly at teens. ^[*23]  

In 1998, concerned about this imbalance, the Pro-Choice Education Project surveyed sixteen- to twenty-four-year-old women nationwide with an eye toward designing a pro-choice public-service advertising campaign. The project found that while almost two-thirds of their respondents selected "pro-choice" when given the options of "pro-choice" and "pro-life," the proportion of support dropped to half when the women were asked if they supported abortion. "They're for women's rights," commented spokesperson Marion Sullivan, "but not necessarily for abortion."

Young men are also affected by anti-abortion propaganda, which may reinforce the masculine pride of paternity and their belief in paternal privilege, whether or not they want to be active fathers. A significant minority of Canadian and American young men -- about a third -- told researchers that they believed a father should have a legal prerogative to prevent a partner from having an abortion. ^[*24] 

Schoolbook Blackout 

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 

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'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 with 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 partners to get pregnant, and four out of five wanted to share the responsibility for contraception. ^[*33] 

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 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.

Access Denied 

If abortion is disappearing as a reproductive "freedom," with all the emotion that word entails, it is also a fleeting right, especially for teenagers. By the late 1990s, there were no abortion providers in nearly a third of the nation's metropolitan areas and in 85 percent of American counties, according to NARAL. ^[*34]  Almost a third of obstetrics and gynecology residencies failed to teach abortion procedures in 1992. compared with just 8 percent that did not in 1976. ^[*35]  And while young women's right and ability to get an abortion declined steadily, their parents' prerogative to stop them increased. As of 1999, parental notification or consent laws were in effect in forty states. ^[*36] 

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 family communication, as they are meant to do. [*39] 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" 

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by such laws. "The desire to maintain secrecy has been one of the leading reasons for illegal abortions since 1973." ^[*41] Yet propaganda claiming that parental consent and notification laws protect minors has been effective. A majority of parents and young women endorse these laws. ^[*42]

In the late 1990s lawmakers fenced pregnant young women into an even smaller familial corral, forbidding any unrelated person, whether a close friend of the family, a trusted minister, or even a relative who was not legally the young woman's guardian, to help her terminate a pregnancy. 

A Pennsylvania woman was convicted in 1996 of "interfering with the custody of a minor" when she drove the thirteen-year-old girlfriend of her nineteen-year-old son to New York State, where there are no parental consent rules, to get an abortion. (The young man was convicted of statutory rape in the consensual relationship.) ^[*43] 

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. ^[*46]  When abortion is involved, the bill's authors implied, the life of a pregnant girl is less valuable than an abstraction called the family.

A Pre-modern Tale 

Throughout most of the developed secular world in the twenty-first century, abortion is considered a normal part of women's reproductive lives. But in the United States, a link between sex and babies, uninterrupted by contraception and abortion, is now assumed by policymakers at every level. 

What has resulted are coercive, ineffective "solutions" to non-marital pregnancy, single motherhood, and the welfare dependency that is presumed to go with it, including resurrected "jailbait" laws and the old-fashioned shotgun wedding. The political center has shifted so far rightward and the symbolic time frame so far backward that even mainstream organizations are

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adopting anachronism and calling it innovation. At its three-day Roundtable on Adolescent Pregnancy and Prevention in 1998, the venerable social-service behemoth the Child Welfare League took up pregnancy termination in none of the scores of workshops and panels. Instead, the league devoted a special series of sessions to running that staple location of 1950s melodramas, "homes for unwed mothers."

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 pre-modern parable, in which fate tumbles to worse fate, sin is chastised, and sex is the ruination of mother, child, and society. 

Gone is pre-meditation in sex; gone too the role of technology, of safe contraception or "planned parenthood." Gone far away is the relief, even joy, of ending an unwanted pregnancy and women's newfound power to decide what they want to do with their bodies and their lives and when they want to do it.

But modern social reality has not gone away, and girls are caught in the middle. In that bizarre match over the morality of single motherhood between a fictional television character and a real-Iife politician, single mom Murphy Brown KO'd her censurer, Dan Quayle. Asked by pollsters in 1994 whether they would become mothers if their childbearing years were waning and they hadn't yet married, more than half of teens said they would. ^[*47] 

Yet on the other, shadowy side of the culture, the taint of "unwed motherhood" grows to a deep, bloody stain. 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 and deposit them, alive or not, in closets and Dumpsters. ^[*48]  For these young women, "getting caught," both as sexual beings and as dumb-Iuck 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.

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