There had been doubt among the religious right from the outset of Ronald Reagan's campaign that he could be an asset to the social and moral demands of their movement; a former Hollywood actor, Reagan had signed the progressive Therapeutic Abortion Act as governor of California in 1967 and spoken out against the 1978 law designed to persecute gay teachers in his state, the Briggs Initiative.Footnote ¹ Aware of their mistrust of his legislative past, Reagan pointedly leant rhetorical support to the Christian right in their political agenda during his campaign, particularly on the key issue of abortion.Footnote ² From the outset of his presidency, multiple attempts were made by the antiabortion movement from within and outside the Reagan administration at overturning the zenith of women's liberation legal gains, Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court case that federally legalized abortion.Footnote ³ The lack of substantive support from the President, however, who had won the election with the help of these groups, soon began to engender frustration within these circles.Footnote ⁴ It became clear not only that did Reagan not have a personal investment in furthering the antiabortion movement from the White House, but also that he would actively avoid association with socio-moral conservative groups and wedge issues, instead choosing to focus on what he viewed as larger-scale issues like taxation, the economy, and the Cold War.Footnote ⁵ Despite the symbolism of Reagan's electoral victory in 1980, it would not mean a sweeping victory for the pro-life movement, and women's access to abortion would not be substantively curtailed, as the issue of abortion raised a more complex set of debates over the course of the 1980s than had appeared at the outset, with an elaborate set of ethical and moral queries that policymakers could not solve.Footnote ⁶

There was an exception to this, however, for one group of American women: teenage girls. Through a series of legislative and legal developments over the course of the two Reagan administrations, abortions became far harder to procure for women under eighteen. This would therefore become the only battle of the culture wars over abortion that the Christian right could celebrate winning.Footnote ⁷ This paper will argue that the ubiquitousness of opinion on the need to regulate young women's sexual behaviour in the wake of the liberal social movements of the 1960s and 1970s was such that this became the easiest area in which to pass multiple restrictive policies and laws.Footnote ⁸ It provided antiabortion thinkers with strict and sometimes alienating views a less controversial platform: that of governing adolescent sexuality. Simultaneously, it became clear in this decade that the majority of Americans wanted some access to abortion, and that the vocal Christian right movement was matched by a powerful set of liberal organizations and institutions that advocated for abortion rights.Footnote ⁹ However, where proposed abortion regulations pertained to school-aged girls, such debates flattened somewhat, making laws easier to pass, due to ubiquitous and deep-seated notions of “childhood sexual innocence” in this period, and a widespread resistance to advocating otherwise.Footnote ¹⁰

These events point to the centrality of teenage female sexuality within the debates on reproductive rights of this period, though this has not yet been fully explored in the vast literature of this period of American history. Historians of women and gender in the United States have brought attention to the ways in which teenage women in America fared the worst in Reagan's welfare cuts, and in antiabortion legislation during his administration, notably in Rickie Solinger's 1998 collection Abortion Wars: A Half Century of Struggle, 1950–2000, in Leslie J. Reagan's When Abortion Was a Crime (1997) and in Linda Gordon's exhaustive history of birth control, The Moral Property of Women (2002).Footnote ¹¹ The particular implications of these policies for young black women were explored at length by Patricia Hill Collins, in her writing on welfare in Black Sexual Politics in 2004, and in Dorothy Roberts's discussion of the health risks posed to young black women by the promotion of “chastity” in 1980s abstinence education policy, in Killing the Black Body in 1997.Footnote ¹² Elsewhere, historians of American conservatism have documented the disappointment of the Christian right, specifically the antiabortion movement, in Ronald Reagan's presidency. In Morning in America (2005), Gil Troy demonstrated the ways that Reagan was a “pragmatist” and not an “ideologue.”Footnote ¹³ This was later the subject of much discussion by Troy and others in Cheryl Hudson and Gareth Davies's 2008 collection Ronald Reagan and the 1980s, particularly in Daniel K. Williams's contribution, which documents Reagan's economic priorities and the frustration this caused for Christian right campaigners, who thought he might advocate for abortion restriction, school prayer, and other wedge social and moral platforms.Footnote ¹⁴ In We Gather Together (2015), Neil J. Young has contributed a detailed analysis of the various factions of the religious right and their individual disappointments in this outcome.Footnote ¹⁵ This paper, then, will speak to these literatures by investigating the exceptional power of teenage female sexuality in its ability to foment sufficient support to pass antiabortion legislation, during a period wherein so much of the Christian right moral–political agenda failed to materialize.

One early, symbolic gesture that Reagan would make to the Christian right whose support had helped elect him was in the hiring of a number of vocally antiabortion figures to his administration, in what journalist Sydney Blumenthal called a “containment strategy.”Footnote ¹⁶ Many of these individuals were drafted in to confront a perceived “epidemic” in teenage pregnancy.Footnote ¹⁷ Thus, from the early days of the Reagan administration, discussing socio-moral issues appeared to be less controversial to Reagan when the reproductive rights in question were those of teenagers. One such individual was Marjory Mecklenburg, former president of American Citizens Concerned for Life, who was appointed head of the Office of Adolescent Pregnancy Programs (OAPP).Footnote ¹⁸ Mecklenburg was brought in to replace Lulu Mae Nix, “one of the few Black Republicans in the Carter administration,” who had hoped to remain as director of the OAPP.Footnote ¹⁹ Another such figure was Gary E. Crum, who was made director of Title X of the Public Health Service Act in 1985, a family planning funding program, whilst still on the advisory board of the American Life Lobby. His stance on the program he had been brought in to manage was that “it has surely made teen-agers more promiscuous,” and he immediately began to advocate defunding Title X.Footnote ²⁰ Reagan also filled some of the administration's most prestigious roles with pro-life advocates; as surgeon general he appointed Everett Koop, a man who was well known for his advocacy against abortion and for sexual abstinence for youth over the course of his medical career.Footnote ²¹ The Republican control of the Senate meant that many domestic programs came under conservative leadership.Footnote ²² Two senators in particular, Jeremiah Denton (R-AL), who was known as the “quintessential representative of the [Christian right] movement's social values,” and Orrin Hatch (R-UT), were committed to making significant changes to domestic federal policy.Footnote ²³ Hatch would go as far as putting forward a constitutional amendment that would override Roe v. Wade in handing power to the states and Congress, though this and other sweeping measures proposed within the administration did not get very far.Footnote ²⁴

The influence of young women's sexual conduct on federal policymaking in this era could also be seen in Reagan's willingness to speak to this issue within his opposition to welfare, from early on in his presidency.Footnote ²⁵ The intersection of this moral issue with an expedient economic issue made such a discussion possible. What was thought to be an “epidemic” of teenage pregnancy in the United States was only one aspect of a wider set of social fears over the existence of an American “underclass,” a term used by conservatives to describe those living in an unending state of poverty and dependency on welfare.Footnote ²⁶ American youth were pivotal to these concerns, for their rates of pregnancy and drug use. The First Lady, Nancy Reagan, engaged with the latter when she famously encouraged a group of schoolchildren in Oakland, California in 1984 to “just say no” to drugs, a slogan that soon became synonymous with saying no to all aspects of liberal morality.Footnote ²⁷ Reagan himself reacted to the former by vocally dismissing Nixon- and Carter-era welfare provisions under Title X family planning, which offered some assistance to single teenage mothers, lambasting the imagined character of the young, pregnant, African American “welfare queen” on benefits in a 1976 election speech, and introducing welfare cuts in the 1981 budget that allowed states to introduce new work-centred measures, which would pave the way for Clinton's total welfare reform in 1996.Footnote ²⁸ In these ways, sexually active teenage girls were emerging as crucial figures in the early days of the culture wars.Footnote ²⁹

The centrality of teenage female sexuality to socio-moral policymaking was extended exponentially with the signing of the Adolescent Family Life Act (AFLA) in 1981, a rare advancement of antiabortion legislation that would give the Christian right a sense of moving in the right direction.Footnote ³⁰ Senators Denton and Hatch were the major forces behind the introduction and writing of AFLA, and they promoted the Act as a corrective to the existing Title X family planning, which they disdainfully called a “safe-sex program for unmarried adolescents.”Footnote ³¹ AFLA was the first piece of federal legislation to promote teaching young people abstinence from sex until marriage in place of contraceptive education, by offering federal funding to public schools that wished to bring in such a program. The Act posited such education as a preventive solution to the perceived rise in teenage pregnancies, and to the need for abortion. The passage of AFLA is also significant in demonstrating the power of teenage sexuality in moving the President, so notably hesitant in putting his weight behind abortion policy, to support the bill. Crucially, the antiabortion motives of the bill were highly obscured. Though its aim was to reduce the number of abortions performed in America, abortion was not explicitly named in the Act. The Act was primarily devised to:

Within relatively few words, the text of AFLA conveyed the moral stance of its creators Senators Denton and Hatch on both abortion and the appropriateness of sex before marriage. Their proposed approach to reducing teenage pregnancy rates was prevention in the first instance, and adoption as an emergency measure in the case of an unwanted pregnancy, both of which asserted an opposition to abortion as an option for young women. Focussing only on the issue of teenage pregnancy also insured that, whilst maintaining gender-neutral language, the Act emphasized the sexual activity of teenage girls. Though disapproving of abortion does not necessarily denote a disapproval of teenage sexual activity altogether, for the writers of AFLA pregnancy prevention would not include increased access to birth control or comprehensive sexual education. Denton and Hatch's decision not to advocate for these approaches to preventing teenage pregnancy was emblematic of a newly compounded cultural conservatism in this period. Before the formation of an extensive Christian right in national politics in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it had not been uncommon for conservative antiabortion legislators to also support the need for increased access to birth control, “so as to make abortion unnecessary”; after the groundswell in their organizing activity around the election of Reagan, however, such a position among conservatives vanished, and the antiabortion and pro-abstinence positions became synonymous, despite the efficacy of birth control in preventing pregnancy.Footnote ³³

Though AFLA had at its core the desire to limit abortions among teenage women, this was to become evident more in the discussion of the Act in subsequent platforms than within the text of the Act itself, thus making it less contentious for Reagan to put his name to. It is noteworthy that he would celebrate this win publicly, which he did by naming it as a source of personal pride in his essay for the Human Life Review in 1983, “Abortion and the Conscience of a Nation.”Footnote ³⁴ In the article, he celebrated AFLA for allowing “new opportunities for unwed mothers to give their children life.”Footnote ³⁵ However, while the Christian right were pleased with his uncharacteristic show of support for their movement through the publishing of this piece, it still allowed Reagan to keep a tactical distance, in that it did not require him to appear in person being photographed with the “crazier” pro-life activists.Footnote ³⁶

In press coverage of AFLA, Reagan's staff were hesitant to explicitly name the Act as an antiabortion policy, thus setting themselves apart from the socio-moral contingent of the Senate who pioneered such policy. One member of his administration, speaking anonymously to the New York Times in 1982, defined the Act as having “an interest in helping teen-agers place babies for adoption,” and not necessarily “having implications for the debate over abortion.”Footnote ³⁷ In the same article, Donald Underwood, grants management officer of the Office of Adolescent Pregnancy Programs, was reticent to herald the policy as a victory for the pro-life movement. Instead, he also urged the public to see the new program as one that “will emphasize counseling about adoption as an alternative to abortion.” When pressed, he admitted, “Probably none of our money could be used for abortion counseling. Abortion would definitely not be encouraged.”Footnote ³⁸ By emphasizing the implications of the bill for pregnant teenagers and avoiding the discussions of abortion, the issue of teenage pregnancy was clearly one which was seen by Reagan and his staff as one with a much wider base of concern, and one with far less political and moral weight, than the issue of abortion.

Though they were aware of the ongoing controversy of debates over abortion, conservatives in Reagan's administration soon learned that the other major component of AFLA, abstinence education, would also require some tact in the climate of the culture wars. The Act that was initially proposed became known derisively among Democrats in Congress and sexual health advocates outside the government as the “teen chastity program” due to the original wording of the policy, which stated that the primary purpose of the Act was “to promote self-discipline and chastity, and other positive, family-centered approaches to the problems of adolescent promiscuity,” and then later went on to define “promiscuity” as meaning any sexual activity outside wedlock.Footnote ³⁹ Due to the uproar this was met with from members of Congress and adolescent sexual health organizations, the text was reworded to the more ambiguous aim: “to promote self-discipline and other prudent approaches to the problem of adolescent sexual relations, including teenage pregnancy.”Footnote ⁴⁰ A closer examination of who protested the inclusion of the word “chastity” and of the implications behind this is illuminating; the shared vexation of many members of the clergy, sexual health advocates such as Planned Parenthood and the Guttmacher Institute, and Democrats in Congress depicts a moment of consensus in opposition to conservative socio-moral policy.Footnote ⁴¹ Such manoeuvring and editing viscerally demonstrates the way that the culture wars were at play in Congress; though putting forward an abstinence bill was less controversial than other outright abortion policies put forward in the Reagan administration because it dealt with teenage girls, there was a moralistic tone that still ruffled the feathers of more progressive groups and individuals. Though the inherent intent and meaning behind the Act remained the same, the rewording allowed for Christian right members of Congress such as Denton and Hatch to put forward a very socially conservative idea of what they considered inappropriate sexual behaviour among young people, or, more specifically, young women.

However, the various groups and individuals that opposed the morality politics of AFLA offered differing critiques of the Act. Planned Parenthood and other such advocacy groups believed that teaching abstinence to young adults in the place of contraception education put young people in unnecessary danger. They were also wary of the presence of the Christian right within the Reagan administration; in 1981, the same year that AFLA was passed in to law, Planned Parenthood were subject to a series of government audits on their use of funds, launched by Senators Denton and Hatch, that accused them of using federal money to “promote abortion as a means of birth control.”Footnote ⁴² This infuriated Faye Wattleton, who had in 1978 been made the youngest and first African American president of Planned Parenthood. She saw these audits as “an abuse of the power and machinery of Government by people philosophically opposed to abortion.”Footnote ⁴³ Another strand of opposition to AFLA came from religious groups and from members of Congress who believed that the Act undermined the religious clauses of the First Amendment of the Constitution, in its suggestion that private religious groups would receive funds to enable them to teach chastity to young people. This complaint ultimately resulted in the 1987 legal case Kendrick v. Bowen, which made the official claim that the “religious organization” mentioned in AFLA was unconstitutional. Brought forward by “a group of federal taxpayers, clergymen, and the American Jewish Congress,” the decision ruled that while on its face AFLA did not have religious motivations, instead being in place to eliminate “social and economic problems caused by teenage sexuality, pregnancy, and parenthood,” it was held that “Appellees have standing to raise the claim that the AFLA is unconstitutional as applied.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Though groups in opposition to AFLA took issue with various components of the Act, what they demonstrated together was the vocal opposition to the activities of the pro-life movement within and outside the federal government, and the centrality of teenage female sexuality within this aspect of the culture wars. We are also reminded of the incendiary potential of wedge political issues, and of Reagan's reasons for generally avoiding them.

Despite this initial contestation of the language of the Act, AFLA would go on to further multiple points of the Christian right's political agenda in addition to discouraging abortion. One such area was that of abstinence-only sex education. The federal funding attached to AFLA was offered to schools that chose to teach abstinence from sex until marriage in place of educating students about safe sex, including contraception. This meant that in order for a school to receive federal funding at all to teach its students sex education, it must only teach students the virtues of sexual abstinence until marriage.Footnote ⁴⁵ By 1985, this funding had been distributed not only to interested school districts but also to new organizations that were developing abstinence-only curricula and programs for these schools to purchase. Kathleen M. Sullivan, the founder of one such organization, named Project Reality, founded her group because of her concern “for all children … who might be negatively affected by so called ‘comprehensive’ sex education which many times advocated sexual activity among teens.”Footnote ⁴⁶ AFLA therefore led to a substantive change in the nature of federal funding for sex education. However, the quantity of funding available and the ambiguity of the language of what was to be taught allowed a certain amount of room for manoeuvre from schools who received this funding. Later federal abstinence policies such as that contained in the Clinton administration's welfare reform bill were far more explicit in what was to be taught, and put forward a far larger sum of money for this task, raising AFLA's $4 million of annual funds to $50 million, which led to a far wider use of abstinence materials in schools in the 1990s.Footnote ⁴⁷

Another conservative goal that was furthered by the passage of AFLA, of which young women were again at the centre, was marriage promotion. Liberals were aware of the importance of this aim to the religious right. Adolescent sexual health advocates the Guttmacher Institute self-published a study in 1981 entitled Teenage Sexuality, Pregnancy, and Childbearing, which sought to debunk the widespread panic over teenage pregnancy rates and to uncover the social concerns that lay beneath these worries. Writing in the Guttmacher Institute's report, Frank Furstenberg, a professor of sociology and an expert on adolescent sexuality, found that conservatives’ fears about “early childbearing” were indicative of “a more general apprehension about the rise in sexual activity among unmarried adolescents.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Furstenberg and others at the Guttmacher Institute concluded in their study that “increases in the premarital sexual activity of young people” would “still cause public concern even if greater use of contraceptives and abortion resulted in a sharp diminution of out-of-wedlock teenage births.” Teenage pregnancy rates, they argued, had therefore “provided an opportunity” for adults to enter into a public discourse on “the sexual mores and sexual instruction of the young.”Footnote ⁴⁹ One individual who used teenage pregnancy rates as a platform from which to discuss sexual mores more widely was the Christian right figurehead Phyllis Schlafly. Writing in a report for her organization, the Eagle Forum, she demonstrated the conservative trend noticed by reproductive-rights advocates in suggesting that marital status was at the heart of what disturbed them about teenage pregnancy. “If a 13-year-old girl can exercise ‘choice’ to ‘control her body’ and get an abortion,” she stated, alluding to the liberal position on how to deal with a teenage pregnancy, “why can't she have the choice to marry?”Footnote ⁵⁰ Though Schlafly was being deliberately provocative in making this statement, she was serious about promoting the institution of marriage as a way of fixing the societal problem of pregnant teenagers, at least for women in their late teens.Footnote ⁵¹ Her comments evoked the social, rather than medical, focus of the Christian right's outrage over teenage pregnancy in the 1980s.Footnote ⁵² They also reiterate the location of teenage women at the nexus of various socio-moral concerns and ambitions of the religious right in the 1980s.

This could be seen, finally, in the way that managing teenage female sexual behaviour was positioned as crucial to the strength of the American family by AFLA, as seen in its suggestion that education about sexuality should ideally take place in the home. In this way, the site of the discussion would reinforce the family-first substance of the conversation. “Services encouraged by the Federal Government should promote the involvement of parents with their adolescent children, and should emphasize the provision of support by other family members, religious and charitable organizations,” it read.Footnote ⁵³ The text of the Act even suggested a particular family model that inherently encouraged the reproduction of that style of unit, namely one headed by a set of married, heterosexual parents. The inverse of this suggestion was that pregnant teenagers were a societal problem not just in the governmental care they would require as young mothers, but also in the subversive family unit that that mother and baby then formed. Many historians have over the past few decades charted the way that historical efforts to instate “family values” through welfare have inevitably chastised low-income black families.Footnote ⁵⁴ AFLA's endorsement of one specific kind of family unit implicitly derided family units that did not conform to that model; in particular, families headed by a young, black, unmarried mother.Footnote ⁵⁵ Such young women have consistently found themselves subject to federal intervention and condescension since LBJ's assistant secretary of labour Daniel Patrick Moynihan penned his damning report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” in 1965.Footnote ⁵⁶ AFLA's pro-family politics continued the Moynihan Report's scapegoating of sexually active black teenage girls for a long list of social woes, blaming them for perpetually raising children without fathers. “In a high proportion of cases,” the opening statement of AFLA reads, “the pregnant adolescent is herself the product of an unmarried parenthood during adolescence and is continuing the pattern in her own lifestyle.”Footnote ⁵⁷ By chiding the low-income young women and families that Title X family planning funding was originally crafted to provide for when it was written in 1970, AFLA constituted a significant refiguring of federal public-health provision, and set a precedent for future welfare reform which would continue to punish particular young women for their sexual and reproductive choices. It also suggests why Reagan was able to put his name to this Act over other pro-family, antiabortion policies, in that it had implications for welfare and thus the economy, a priority of his from the outset.

The connection between adolescent sexual activity and the strength of the American family was reflected in the actions and writings of various extra-governmental conservative thinkers in the years following the introduction of AFLA. In the introduction to his 1981 pamphlet What's Wrong with Sex Education, the conservative psychoanalytic doctor and writer Melvin Anchell dedicated the booklet to “decent people-loving people in our nation,” who he believed “exemplify the life sustaining nature of human sexuality” by teaching their children through example “the wonder of sexually fulfilled man/woman monogamous love – the meaning of life itself.”Footnote ⁵⁸ As in the text of AFLA, Anchell's propagandistic material suggested that sustaining a successful heterosexual monogamous marriage would serve as a replacement for sex education, merely by setting an example of how to live.

As the 1980s progressed, parents of teenage girls would play an increasingly important role for the Christian right. In 1985, Judie A. Brown, president of the American Life Lobby, stated in a speech that Title X funding had created “a lot of promiscuity” among adolescents, which had in turn “divorce[d] them from parental authority.”Footnote ⁵⁹ This reemphasized the role of the parent that was espoused in the Moynihan Report, which positioned a child's promiscuous sexual behaviour and pregnancy before marriage as indicative of a substandard moral example set by the parents.Footnote ⁶⁰ The Adolescent Family Life Act had been seen by Congressional conservatives as an attempt to control the problem of teenagers behaving outside parental control, and this effort was reified by a series of Supreme Court cases which expanded the rights of a parent to control their child's access to an abortion. Like AFLA, the escalation of parental notification and consent laws for minors’ abortions during this period made teenage female sexuality the central issue in order to put forward antiabortion and pro-family legislation.Footnote ⁶¹ The three major cases that allowed states to require parental notification or consent from parents for minors’ abortions were H. L. v. Matheson in 1981, Planned Parenthood of Kansas City v. Ashcroft in 1983, and Planned Parenthood of S. E. Pennsylvania v. Casey in 1992. These cases were preceded by Bellotti v. Baird in 1979, which struck down a Massachusetts statute that required parental consent for minors’ abortions as unconstitutional.Footnote ⁶² These three cases, then, demonstrated an increasing acceptance, in this period, of sexually active young women as unable to make informed decisions about their sexual and reproductive health, which reinforced the idea that they were children in need of care. That these were signed into law, over restrictions for abortions for adult women, shows how unifying teenage sexual misconduct was for conservatives of all stripes, inside and outside the Reagan administration. However, they also demonstrate a building sense of parental obligation in controlling adolescent sexual behaviour following on from Reagan's welfare cuts and from the introduction of AFLA.

The stringency of these Supreme Court decisions increased with each case, each one reinforcing the expectation that parents were responsible for their daughters’ sexual behaviour, and in turn that they should refuse them the right to obtain an abortion. In 1981, H. L v. Matheson upheld that requiring parental consent for a minor to obtain an abortion was unconstitutional, but maintained that requiring the minor to notify their parent was not. The statute confirmed that a state could require “a physician to ‘notify, if possible,’ the parents or guardian of a minor upon whom an abortion is to be performed.”Footnote ⁶³ The Court's Chief Justice Warren E. Berger delivered the decision, going on to state that the statute was not believed to be “unconstitutionally restricting a minor's right of privacy to obtain an abortion or enter into a doctor–patient relationship.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Maintaining “family integrity” was mentioned in the Matheson decision as an important rationalization in allowing states to introduce parental notification laws, corroborating the effectiveness of invoking teenage female sexuality in uniting antiabortion, pro-marriage, and antiwelfare sentiment during this period.Footnote ⁶⁵ By 1983, the Planned Parenthood of Kansas City v. Ashcroft decision reflected the growing impact of pro-family politics at the national, federal level. Expanding the ability of states to require parental notification from Matheson, it ruled that a state wishing to require “parental consent or consent from the Juvenile Court for an abortion” was constitutional.Footnote ⁶⁶ This was reinforced by the 1992 ruling in Planned Parenthood of S. E. Pennsylvania v. Casey, that upheld state parental-consent laws as entirely constitutional. In the plurality opinion put forward by Supreme Court Justices O'Connor, Kennedy, and Souter, the Casey decision reiterated the importance of such laws in fortifying the roles of both parents and children: “It is reasonably designed to further the State's important and legitimate interest in the welfare of its young citizens, whose immaturity, inexperience, and lack of judgment may sometimes impair their ability to exercise their rights wisely.”Footnote ⁶⁷

This renewed focus on the parents’ role in the sexual and reproductive decisions of their teenage children reached far wider than conservative lawmakers, demonstrating again the saliency of teenage pregnancy in this period even to those who might not usually rally around socio-moral issues. Some culture war progressives also thought that encouraging discussions about sex to occur more frequently between parents and their children could potentially help to lower teenage pregnancy rates. The substantive difference in the arguments put forward was that liberals, including reproductive-health advocates or those in liberal think tanks such as the Family Impact Seminar, did not feel that federal policy should dictate this. In Kristin Moore and Martha Burt's 1982 study Private Crisis, Public Cost, they found that “intervention is easier and less costly earlier in the decision-making process and closer to the individuals involved – for example, before pregnancy and within the family or local community, rather than after pregnancy or at the national level.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Contrary to the writers of AFLA or the Supreme Court Justices involved in the abortion notification and consent cases, Moore and Burt saw federal policy and community or family involvement as mutually exclusive approaches. Moore and Burt's study also made claims that differed from those of the creators of the Adolescent Family Life Act in that they saw frank conversations in the home as being important in addition to sex education at school, and did not see these two approaches as ideologically opposed. “Sex education in conjunction with contraceptive services and follow-up appears to be a particularly effective approach,” they wrote.Footnote ⁶⁹ This issue, like other matters of reproductive and sexual health, presented an anomaly in the traditions of classically conservative and liberal American thought, in that those on the right uncharacteristically advocated for more extensive government control, and those on the left found themselves advocating for less government involvement in private lives. The Democratic Congressman for California, Henry Waxman, demonstrated this paradigm in his comments on the parental notification laws in 1984. “Suddenly, the most private decisions are a public controversy,” he complained.Footnote ⁷⁰

A number of studies and publications accumulated over the course of the 1980s that demonstrated the importance of parental involvement in teenagers’ sexual lives to adults across the political spectrum, and how widespread societal concern for young women had become in the age of AIDS, a post-sexual-liberation society, and perceived spikes in teenage pregnancy rates.Footnote ⁷¹ In a parenting guide published in 1980, The Parent's Guide to Teenage Sex and Pregnancy, progressive writers Howard and Martha E. Lewis argued that increased parental involvement in the lives of teenagers could reduce the potential risks of youthful sex. “Innumerable books purport to teach youngsters about sex,” they explained, whilst noting that “none are genuinely helpful to mothers and fathers, the forgotten figures in the crises of sexual maturing.”Footnote ⁷² They went on to encourage parents to see themselves as “an essential source of sexual knowledge and guidance for your children.”Footnote ⁷³ In a study for the liberal think tank the Family Impact Seminar in 1981, policy analyst Theodora Ooms also concluded that “policy discussions and research about teenage sex and fertility have almost totally neglected the adolescent's family,” and that this should be rectified.Footnote ⁷⁴ One key difference between liberal advocacy for increased parental involvement and that of conservatives is that in liberal writing it was acknowledged that being frank with teenagers about sex may potentially be awkward and uncomfortable. Ooms wrote on this topic in the Family Impact Seminar study, noting that it was often hard for parents to begin such conversations with their teenage children “because an individual's sexual behavior is generally considered to be a private, personal area of life in which the intrusion of others, even family members, is inappropriate.”Footnote ⁷⁵

Ultimately, however, when it came to enshrining in law the necessity of a parent to be notified or to give consent for their child to have an abortion, even those liberals who agreed parents should be more involved drew a line, revealing that while teenage sexual activity emerged as important to adults on both sides of the culture wars in this period, it had particular salience for social conservatives. As the parental notification and consent laws became increasingly restrictive, it became clear that Christian right sentiments within the federal government and judicial system did not reflect mainstream views on this topic. New York Times staffer Nadine Brozan laid out the central concerns of many Americans in a 1982 op-ed piece. “Do parents have the right to know that contraceptive drugs or devices have been prescribed for their adolescent children?” she asked doubtfully. “Or do teen-agers have the right to obtain birth control without the knowledge – and possible disapproval – of their parents?”Footnote ⁷⁶ There was a sense of consensus across the national press that the notification requirements had potentially dangerous implications for the sexual and reproductive health of young women.Footnote ⁷⁷ Reagan appeared to be aware of the building backlash against these rulings at the time, and, speaking to a convention of evangelical Christians in 1983, stated,

Here, teenage female sexual behaviour offered a convenient vehicle through which Reagan could connect with a Christian right that was suspicious of his loyalty to their causes. Laws that necessitated parental notification or consent for an abortion propagated the idea that sexually active young women were incapable of acting with agency over their own bodies, and that they needed adult intervention to make any decisions regarding their sexual or reproductive lives.Footnote ⁷⁹ Whether or not Reagan himself felt particularly impassioned by this cause, he was able to employ a “Judeo-Christian” moral approach to unmarried teenage sex as a less controversial platform from which to placate the Christian right in their fight against legalized abortion.

However, while many moral and social conservatives might have been satisfied with these limited successes, many liberals were not won over, and their reactions revealed the limitations of relying on teenage female sexual behaviour as a less controversial approach to divisive social policies.Footnote ⁸⁰ Because of the increasing opposition to parental notification laws, the most stringent parental notification measure failed to pass into law. In 1983, members of Reagan's administration put forward a “squeal rule” that would have enforced all medical professionals to notify parents whenever their unmarried minors sought contraceptive services or advice from them. While the parental-consent cases triggered debate, this sparked outrage. There were multiple layers to the critique it received. The policy was struck down in the same year that it was written, in the case State of New York v. Heckler. In delivering the decision, the presiding judge, Henry F. Werker, determined that it was unviable because “the deterrent effect of the regulations will cause increased adolescent pregnancies” that were “fraught with dangers to the health of both the young mother and her child.”Footnote ⁸¹ In their support for the squeal rule, moral conservatives within the Reagan administration again demonstrated that at the core of their concern over the rate of teenage pregnancy in the US was a moral opposition to childbearing out of wedlock, rather than the medical danger of childbirth before full physical development. Beyond the belief that this policy would actually serve to increase the number of teenage pregnancies, opponents saw the potential for this policy to harm those most in need of government-funded sexual-health services.Footnote ⁸² Kathleen Carscallen, director of the Buffalo General Hospital Family Planning Program, noted that the desire of conservatives to “bring the teen and parent back together again” was redundant in family planning, as “a good number of young women already involve their parents,” and that the squeal rule would therefore “hit those most in need of confidential services, those from troubled homes.”Footnote ⁸³ Planned Parenthood President Faye Wattleton even claimed that if the squeal rule was to pass, they would “look for other ways to fund the programs” so that they would not have to comply in alerting parents of young people who sought help from them.Footnote ⁸⁴ Many doctors also found themselves opposing the squeal rule and supporting the rights of teenage girls to privacy, even when they disagreed with the sexual conduct of the young women in question, due to an increasing move towards confidentiality within the medical profession.Footnote ⁸⁵ As information and misinformation about the AIDS virus spread, this trend of conservative medical practitioners making exceptions to their beliefs in order to ensure medical safety was widespread. This trend was even demonstrated by the surgeon general, the antiabortion Christian conservative Everett Koop, who would stand his ground in resistance to those on the Christian right who stood in the way of providing information to teenagers. Though his proposed sex education plan was blocked in Congress, he insisted that education about sex, though from a conservative moral standpoint, of course, was medically prudent in the age of AIDS.Footnote ⁸⁶

Ultimately, the issue of teenage female sexuality, as viewed through the social panic over perceived rising teenage pregnancy rates in the 1980s, provides a lens through which to expand the current state of knowledge on the work of the antiabortion movement in the US. Antiabortion activists were only able to celebrate minor policy successes in this decade, in comparison with their ambitious plans for constitutional amendments and foetal-personhood laws. Ronald Reagan, despite the hope the Christian right put in him during his election, was hesitant to align himself with niche social and moral movements, instead wanting to leave his legacy as President in the realm of economic affairs and global relations. For this reason, it is hugely significant that those “small legislative victories” for the Christian right, the policies and laws which gained enough momentum and support from within the administration and which Reagan chose to endorse publicly, were those abortion laws which pertained to the sexual lives of teenage girls.Footnote ⁸⁷ The interactions of liberals with these policy developments also revealed the extent of the relevance of teenage female sexuality to varying political agendas in this decade of heated social and moral debate, indicating that the sexuality of young women was pertinent not only within conservative arguments, but to the wider culture wars as they emerged over the course of the Reagan administration. The sexuality of young women had come to inhabit a place of political importance in the 1980s in which it would remain for decades to come.