Sexuality is not merely symbolic, an acting out of fantasies and norms received from the dominant culture (family, church, media, films, and novels). It is primarily social and is experienced through social relation­ships, not only with immediate sexual partners but also with the agents of sexual authority and classification: parents, peers, religious figures, and medical […]

Attempts to get at the meanings of adolescent sexuality and not just the frequency of intercourse seem to elude family planners and sex researchers. One review of reported studies on adolescent behavior from the mid-1940s through the mid-1970s warns "that we know little about normal adolescent sexual behavior," that existing data is incomplete and subject […]

Two explanations are offered in the demographic literature for the increase in adolescent pregnancies and abortions since 1970: that of main­stream demographers, who proclaim a "rise in teenage sexual activity"; and that of feminist sociologists, who emphasize a continuity of traditional sexual norms in the midst of changing conditions. Both are focused pri­marily on issues […]

Both feminists and antifeminists understand birth control and abor­tion as necessary conditions for women’s sexual freedom, but they are far from sufficient; and the practical connections between birth control/ abortion and sexuality are by no means clear. Relief from the fear of unwanted pregnancy remains for most women an end in itself, but one that […]

He’s not really worrying about what’s going to happen to you. He’s only worrying about himself. This time I think what I really thought was if you don’t think about it, maybe you’ll get something out of it. So I guessed it wouldn’t be a hassle, I wouldn’t worry about it. And I did get […]

Not only the quality or safety of the prevailing contraceptive methods is problematic but also the institutional contexts through which these methods are administered. What we might call the social relations of the clinic, as they apply to reproductive health care, directly affect wom­en’s contraceptive use in ways that in some instances impede rather than […]

The standards that pit "efficacy" against women’s health and well­being are at odds with feminist standards of reproductive freedom as they evolved in the 1970s. Both the contraceptive practices of women, as embodied in their increasing caution about the pill, and feminist ideol­ogy, as articulated by the women’s health movement, reject the notion that women […]

Because of their more than 98 percent reliability and their requirement of a physician’s services to be obtained and used, oral contraceptives and IUDs (intrauterine devices) are known as "medically effective" methods.39 Next to abortion and surgical sterilization, the method of fertil­ity control used most frequently among American women since the mid — 1960s has […]

Sterilization By the late 1970s in the United States, surgical sterilization had be­come the most prevalent form of contraception among women over the age of twenty-five.21 A good deal has been written about sterilization, and my purpose here is not to analyze it in depth but to understand the nature of its relationship to abortion. […]

The questions, Why do there have to be so many abortions? Why don’t more women use contraception? are wrongly put. Most women who seek abortion are contraceptive users; they have not "substituted" abortion for contraception. The increase in abortions and the increase in contraceptive use in the 1970s occurred simultaneously. Until a "per­fect" method of […]