Unly a generation ago, social assumptions about the consequences that must follow from premarital sexual activity and premarital conception were radically different from what they are today. In the "baby boom" years of the 1950s, social norms prescribed that an out-of-wedlock conception lead inexorably to marriage and the bearing of a "legitimate" child. A group of working-class adults who had married in the 1950s and early 1960s, for example, reported during interviews that for them abortion was simply "not a choice" and that getting married was the only imaginable outcome to a premarital pregnancy. "Of course if you get pregnant, you get married; everybody does. Everybody just expected us to get married when I got pregnant—my parents, his parents, our friends."1 Today, most young people, whatever their level of sexual activity, seem to have a different expectation. Access to birth control and legal abortion have contributed to a changing consciousness among women that they might legitimately defer marriage and childbearing to other goals and needs, without deferring sex. This consciousness, the growing demand for abortion services, and legalization itself were products of the changing social conditions discussed in the previous chapter.
Nevertheless, this fundamental alteration of consciousness has affected different women differently, particularly as collective experiences are shaped by class, race, age, or life cycle. Depending on her relatively higher or lower class position, a woman might have seen abortion in the 1970s as a condition of either her expanded possibilities or her ability to maintain some control over a highly constrained set of circumstances. In either case, it was a socially determined need. Examining the precise contours of that need in different circumstances can show us the given limits on "choice." This analysis can help clarify the demographic commonalities and social differences underlying abortion practices in the
1970s. It can show us that if access to abortion is a need of women collectively, that need presents itself with particular urgency at certain ages and in certain life conditions.