Legalization, public funding, and public legitimacy have contributed to a significant rise in abortions in the United States since 1970 (see Figure 4-1). The proportion of pregnant women who legally terminate their pregnancy has risen steadily, from 19 percent in 1973 to 30 percent in 1979, an increase of 58 percent in six years.2 As we saw in the previous chapter, this increase and its social determinants reflect patterns that emerged quite distinctly by the 1960s. Their impact has been concentrated on women in particular age groups and social situations.
To understand the specificity of abortion trends in the 1970s, it is important to look at the social characteristics of women who get abortions.
 |
 |
Figure 4-і. U. S. Abortion Rate per 1,000 Women Aged 15-44, 1973-1980
Year
source: Adapted from Stanley K. Henshaw et al., "Abortion Services in the United States, 1979 and 1980," in Family Planning Perspectives 14 (January/February 1982), p. 7.
At the present time in the United States these women tend overwhelmingly to be young and unmarried. Two-thirds (65 percent) of all women getting abortions each year since 1975 have been between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, and three-quarters (75 percent) have been unmarried.3 This pattern contrasts with earlier periods when abortion was a practice mainly of older married women with children, who used it as a regular means of fertility control rather than a "backup method."4 It is true that in the 1880s and 1890s most abortions also occurred among young unmarried women, but then it was a sign of the delegitimation that physicians had brought about; abortion became a phenomenon of "the poor, the socially desperate, and the unwed—usually seduced or misled."5 Today the youth and single status of most abortion clients is a sign of the legitimacy of abortion, its association with normal reproductive conditions, and the increasing visibility of women’s sexuality outside the patriarchal family.
Two groups of women in particular have contributed to the recent increase in abortion rates: teenage women, especially whites, and slightly older poor and minority women. They have been the primary beneficiaries of legalization and expanded services. The centrality of white middle — class teenagers in this development has had far-reaching political implications. It has become the basis of a distorted ideological construction of teenage sexuality and teenage abortion as a pathology rfequiring therapeutic intervention, or a sin requiring political and "moral" restrictions. But the trend itself—the fact that significantly more teenage girls today than twenty years ago get pregnant out of wedlock and have abortions—is undeniable. Its social roots have to be distinguished carefully from the ideological and political struggles that occur in its wake. Among those social roots are a set of factors that have reshaped the life situations of many teenage and young adult women. These include an overall shift toward later marriage, a resultant increase in premarital heterosexual activity and intimate relationships, and the increased primary involvement of young women of reproductive age in school or work rather than childbearing in marriage.
Young American women during the 1970s married later than their predecessors and tended with greater frequency to live as "single" women, either with male (or female) partners or alone. In 1980, 50 percent of all women aged 20-24 were unmarried, compared with 36 percent in 1970.6 (See Table 3-3.) A similar trend away from marriage occurred for eighteen — and nineteen-year-olds. These developments were linked to important changes in the domestic living arrangements of young women. Between 1970 and 1980 the number of female "single-person households" involving women under twenty-five years of age more than doubled, while households consisting of an unmarried couple tripled.7 And for women who entered marriage, the tendency toward greater regulation of childbearing could be seen in the increasing delay of childbearing after marriage and also the spacing of children closer together.8
The postponement of marriage and childbearing has lengthened the years of young women’s premarital sexual life by advancing the endpoint of this stage in the life cycle. Its beginning point has stretched as well, since the average age at menarche, or onset of menstruation, has lowered in the course of the last few generations due to improvements in health and nutrition. Taken by itself, this extension in the potential time span of premarital sexual activity could be expected to generate a higher incidence of unwanted pregnancy and thus the need for, and recourse to, abortion.9 This consequence, however, is not a "natural" or "biological" phenomenon, like the mating of birds. It occurs because of a changed consciousness among young women about the sequence of their life events; their capacity, as young women, to be self-sufficient; and the diminished social penalties of sexual activity.
A related development, which also reflects young women’s changed attitudes and practice concerning premarital pregnancy, is the rise in out — of-wedlock births. Young American women, especially whites, in the 1970s were much less inclined than their mothers and grandmothers to "legitimate" the first pregnancy through marriage.10 The percentage of premaritally pregnant white girls aged 15-19 who legitimated their pregnancies fell from 51 percent in 1971 to 31 percent in 1976, down to 20 percent in 1979. For blacks, the decline was from 8.5 percent in 1971 to 4 percent in 1979. In historical perspective, the recent decline in the proportion of legitimated pregnancies represents a return to the lower levels characteristic of the World War II period, which antedated the peak in legitimation of the late 1950s and early 1960s.11
Why has this change occurred? To what extent is it the result of legal abortion, relieving the pressure on young people to marry? That postponed marriages and legal abortion are independent developments is evident from the fact that the increase in the numbers of pregnant teenage women who chose to give birth without getting married began in the late 1960s, prior to the legalization of abortion. This suggests that changing consciousness concerning unlegitimated births is not merely an attitudinal by-product of a change in the law.12 Rather, its social roots are deeper and more complex.
The rise in out-of-wedlock first births occurred at the same time that a growing percentage of young women were resolving their pregnancies through abortion. In this context "postponement of marriage" is not just an interesting but isolated demographic fact. It is part of a larger set of social and cultural changes that have resulted in both rising abortion rates and rising out-of-wedlock birthrates among young American women, especially if they are white and middle class. In Chapter 3 we found that these changes include (1) the expansion in higher education and technical training for women and (2) an expanding (if sex-segregated) capitalist market for women’s labor. These conditions of the 1960s and 1970s, although far from uniform in their impact on women, created an expectation—reflected in and brought to consciousness by the feminist movement—that women’s situation and possibilities were improving.
If aborting an out-of-wedlock pregnancy or giving birth to an unlegitimated baby seem to be opposite choices, they are linked by this common element of consciousness, which in turn arises out of the social changes I have described. Both involve the rejection of early marriage as the defining objective in women’s lives, and at least an expectation of economic independence. Fewer young women "feel obligated to marry as soon as possible for lack of an alternative, socially acceptable role" or in order to legitimate their pregnancy.13 Without minimizing the constraining conditions of class and race that affect contraceptive practice and unplanned pregnancies, or the hardships of single motherhood, it is possible to recognize the decline of compulsory marriage as a progressive development. To an increasing extent, young women sense that they can consider abortion or single motherhood from the standpoint of their own needs rather than from the dictates of family pressure or traditional social stigmatization. In so doing they are seeking to reconcile their reproductive decision with a self-determined life, even as their achievement of such a life is undermined by the social relations of male domination and class and racial inequality.
This interpretation of recent developments in young women’s reproductive experience differs from two alternative perspectives: (1) the widely circulated image of an "epidemic" of adolescent pregnancy and childbearing, and (2) the explanation of changing behavior as a response to economic hardship. The first perspective, which describes pregnancy on the model of a communicable disease, is not supported by evidence concerning teenage patterns of sexuality, pregnancy, and childbirth. While teenagers as a group have experienced a rising pregnancy rate, their birthrate, like that of every other group of U. S. women, has declined since the 1960s. This is largely because of access to abortion. The rising number of out — of-wedlock births among whites (that of black women of all ages declined in the 1970s) was occurring by the late 1970s among all unmarried white women, not only teenagers; in fact, the rate of "illegitimacy" among teenagers still represents the lowest rate of any group of unmarried women under thirty. Moreover, this increase in "illegitimate" births among teenagers is partly a result of the fact that the teenage birthrate as a whole has declined, so out-of-wedlock births become a larger proportion of the total.14
It is spurious to call this an "epidemic," when in fact two-thirds of all "sexually active" teenagers manage not to get pregnant. Figure 4-2 reveals that pregnancy, particularly out-of-wedlock childbearing, is a
|
 |
source: Adapted from Alan Guttmacher Institute, Teenage Pregnancy; The Problem That Hasn’t Gone Away (New York, 1981), Fig. 10.
Metropolitan-Area Teenage Women, 15-19 (1979)
source: Adapted from Melvin Zelnik and John F. Kantner, "Sexual Activity, Contraceptive Use and Pregnancy Among Metropolitan-Area Teenagers: 1971-1979," in Family Planning Perspectives 12 (Sep- tember/October 1980).
rather small slice of reality when seen from the perspective of teenage women taken as a whole. Only 8.5 percent had pregnancies that were resolved in 1978, and only 2.5 percent bore out-of-wedlock babies. Nearly two out of three unmarried teenage pregnancies (62 percent) in 1978 resulted in abortions or miscarriages, slightly more than one out of three (38 percent) in live births.15 Among metropolitan-area women surveyed, aged 15-19, only 16 percent had ever had a premarital pregnancy, or slightly less than one-third of those who had ever had premarital intercourse. Not "illegitimacy," then, but the urge to be sexually active, to delay or avoid marriage and childbearing, to continue school, and to utilize abortion if necessary to make that possible became major patterns for teenage women in the 1970s.
The second perspective explains delayed marriage as a response to male unemployment (as opposed to female independence). This approach appears especially applicable to the late 1970s, when high inflation combined with a deepening recession. It suggests that young women were putting off marriage—even when they were pregnant and rejected abortion—because economic hardships made men unavailable to them.16
Without discounting the probable reality of aspects of this description for some women, especially the poorest and least educated, we can see certain problems with it as a general explanation. First, the postwar rise in illegitimacy rates occurred throughout the "baby boom" for all age groups and, except for a slight decline in the late 1960s among women in their twenties, characterized the years of economic expansion prior to the recent recession. Second, it is important to recall that the Great Depression in the 1930s was characterized not by a rise in illegitimacy but by a fall, corresponding to declining fertility rates generally.17 The explanation in terms of economic hardship appears mistaken in asserting an invariant relation between economic stress and increased illegitimacy. Finally, that recent increases in out-of-wedlock childbearing, like those in abortion, exist among white middle-class women confirms the present interpretation that their source is not economic stress so much as "the changing relationships between sexual behavior and the social mechanisms controlling it," especially "the role of the family as the principal regulator of sexual expression."18
While the moralizing reactionaries of the New Right bemoan the decline of family "regulation" of sexuality, I am arguing, on the contrary, that important aspects of this change are the progressive, inevitable consequence of young women’s gains, during the 1960s and 1970s, in access to economic and educational resources. I am not suggesting that frequent pregnancies and abortions among very young women are healthy or desirable19 or that there are no serious problems among teenagers that impede a successful (and preferable) reliance on regular birth control use. These impediments, as we see in Chapter 6, have to do with both consciousness and sociopolitical structure—with the pervasive ideas about sexuality that teenage women themselves reflect, and the institutional and cultural forces that sometimes make recourse to contraception difficult or risky for them. Abortion has become a central part of the "facts of life" for teenage women because of a set of changing social conditions that, on the whole, have improved their prospects as women in a male — dominated society. In the long run, while unsettling to parents and threatening to sexual conservatives, these conditions enhance young women’s sense of control over their futures and their sexuality. Moreover, available public health data suggest that when abortion is conducted early, under safe and sanitary conditions, the health risks of even repeated abortions among teenage women are much less serious than the health risks from childbirth.20
What is dangerous is the tendency of some girls to deny they are pregnant and thus delay seeking an abortion until late in the pregnancy— often so late that health risks increase greatly. This pattern of denial and delay results from teenagers’ fears that their parents (especially fathers) will find out and be angry and punitive. Both late abortions and an untold number of births to teenage women are the product, not of liberalization, but of continued sexual conservatism in the midst of greater access to safe early abortion.
In the analysis presented to this point, I have placed women’s increased reliance on abortion in the general framework of consciousness and expectation of improved economic and social conditions for women in the United States. This is a very different approach from one that sees abortion as a "desperate measure," a "last resort," or else an act of careless "hedonism," which distorts the actual situation of most women getting abortions. It is important, however, to examine how social conditions of class and racial inequality differentiate women’s experience of abortion. These conditions may severely limit the fulfillment of the promise of a better, self-determined life for women, which society’s provision of legalized abortion services appears to offer.