From Birth Control to Sex Control: Unruly Young Women and the Origins of the National Abstinence-Only Mandate

Abstract

In the early 1980s, conservative politicians in the United States argued that the federal government was promoting promiscuity by providing teens with confidential access to government-funded family planning services. Claiming the problem was not that young women were getting pregnant but that they were having sex, they promised a new national policy—one that would stress self-discipline and family values over sexual indulgence. As argued in this paper, the resulting abstinence-only federal mandate both draws upon and reinforces traditional sexual scripts, which hold young women responsible for keeping male passion in check, thus selectively burdening them with the work of “doing abstinence.”