Not My Daughter/Teenage Sexuality

...Since this range of views includes Southern Baptists, John Paul II, some physicians, radical feminists, political conservatives and many Marxists, as well as most parents and pregnant adolescents, it is easy to see why this side of the debate has not coalesced...

...young mothers tend not to finish their schooling...

...Commonweal: 312...

...These factions have trenchant criticisms to make of the medical solution and their combined capacity to enlighten and broaden it is immense...

...They might go on to examine the socialization of the young which ends, even in this era of woman's liberation, in so many adolescent women believing that self-esteem derives essentially from having a man and in so many adolescent men believing that, self-esteem derives from work and the preparation for work—and having had a woman...

...Sorry to say, the book doesn't quite live up to that image...

...Not My Daughter is a step apart from the Guttmacher proposals in acknowledging familial interest in the issue...

...But what if my improbable coalition joined the debate...

...Eleven million teenagers, by the way, refers to the number of sexually active, married and unmarried 15 to 19-year-olds [7 million young men and 4 million young women] in 1975, not to pregnant adolescents [all women] which numbered one million...

...I began by noting that only one side of the debate was organized and I have implied that it is also the more articulate...

...If youthful pregnancies or their possibility are a "disease," contraception or abortion are the "cure...

...Katherine Oettinger, former chief of the Children's Bureau (HEW), first gives the facts: in 1975, 30,000 pregnancies to girls under 15 resulting in 13,000 births, and 1 million pregnancies to girls 15-19, resulting in 600,000 births...

...Although addressed to parents, the book ends up recommending the medical solution to them...

...These and a hundred other issues might be taken up in developing a broader approach to the problem of adolescent pregnancies...

...She covers the medical and social welfare issues from abortion to delivery with a slight tilt toward emphasizing the health risks of carrying a pregnancy to term and ignoring the rare but important risk abortion may pose to future pregnancies...

...It is not clear what purpose the survey questionnaire served, for rather than drawing a statistical picture of the phenomenon, Hass, a sex therapist at UCLA medical school, strings together a series of quotes that are a jumble of the vulgar and exploitative, the cautious and curious, the thoughtful and caring...

...Not all proponents of the medical solution deny the importance of other values...

...and it appears to be value-neutral in exhorting improved health and well-being for adolescents...

...Yet the medical solution is likely to win the debate: it is simple...

...Its various outlooks range from those who acknowledge the seriousness of the adolescent pregnancy problem, but who do not believe that a medical perspective is adequate either as a description or a solution to those who ignore the problem entirely except to see adolescent pregnancy as the just punishment for adolescent sex...

...What could they say that would reorient and broaden the medical solution...

...and second draws out the implications: infants of adolescent mothers are at-risk for a variety of developmental and physical handicaps...

...We learn nothing, for example, about their attitudes toward pregnancy and contraception, nor about their capacity for intimacy...

...Spock visits an English public school run by the Marquis de Sade...

...Margaret O'Brien Steinfels AN IMPORTANT POLICY issue is being debated in this country: how to deal with adolescent pregnancies, Unfortunately only one side of the debate has organized and made its case in a rational and compelling fashion: adolescent pregnancies are primarily a medical problem and should be treated by medical means...

...And with those informal controls would come a reacknowledgment and assertion of the family's importance in mediating and supporting its values in the face of a highly eroticized and nihilistic popular culture that doesn't even have the aesthetic grace to be romantic, but is a powerful social legitimator...

...And what of the economic and labor force conditions that make it so difficult for young people to find and keep jobs that would provide the means both for establishing stable relationships—ones 23 May 1980: 311 in which children could be born and raised—and for opening a wider variety of arenas to develop one's identity and sense of self-worth...

...The most candid statement of this position was made in a 1976 report issued by the Alan Guttmacher Institute of the Planned Parenthood Federation and titled: "11 Million Teenagers: What Can Be Done About the Epidemic of Adolescent Pregnancies in the United States...

...The larger moral, social, and political issues are then defused by shifting the "disease" and the "cure" to neutral territory—the hospital and the doctor's office...

...Finally they might reassert the importance of informal social controls for governing the pace at which young people develop and acknowledge the sexual and erotic aspects of their personality...

...Teenage Sexuality is to social science as Charlie's Angels is to women's liberation—something for the voyeurs...

...Still others maintain values that preclude sex outside of marriage, are not particularly punitive in their attitude toward pregnant adolescents, but who tend not to say anything in the public debate except, "No...

...They might also examine the cultural forces that are bringing the sexual double standard to an end in favor of a single standard—the male one...

...The inaccurate use of the word "epidemic" to characterize the situation as highly contagious set the stage for the report's widely publicized analysis and recommendations that included greater funding of and access to medical care for adolescents, especially contraception and abortion...

...The other side's diversity makes it difficult to describe and characterize...

...A final chapter bowing to "the essential ingredient: values," by its brevity—six pages—only underscores the dominance of the medical solution in the public debate...

...Rather than giving a sense of how adolescents really feel or think on the subject of sex, Hass suffuses the text with his instrumentalist view: sex is an end in itself without social connections or meaning to other areas of an adolescent's life...

...The total number of adolescents 15-19 in 1975 was twenty-one million...

...The book is a reflection and example of the asocial and apolitical implications of the "therapeutic" view, which also underlays much of the medical solution to adolescent pregnancies...

...They might begin by reminding us that sex, sexuality, and reproduction are inextricably tied to social and economic relations, and that sex as an end in itself is an illusion of the politically unconscious and socially naive...

...To care about one's sexual partner is useful, but not necessary, because some people, especially women (who tend to be backward about this) are more relaxed when they care about their sexual partner...

...This view promotes technological means for reducing suffering to the forefront of the policy debate and prefers that other values—important perhaps, but potentially troublesome—be bracketed...

...it is cheap...

...And there are those who see sexual liberation in some fundamental ways in conflict with women's liberation...

...they simply relegate them to the marketplace of individual preferences...

...She has no magic formula for doing this, nor how to be an askable parent, but her counsel is generally wellinformed...

...TEENAGE SEXUALITY: A SURVEY OF TEENAGE SEXUAL BEHAVIOR Aaron Hass Macmillan, $10.95, 203 pp...

...are likely to be unmarried and on welfare, and are likely to become pregnant soon again...

...The "survey" is a non-informative, non-random sampling of six hundred and twenty-five 15-to-18-year- olds, mostly from Southern California, and their attitudes and activities, including as the dust jacket unsyntactically advertises: "The importance of sex, masturbation, orgasm, virginity, homosexuality, fantasies, performance anxiety, response to pornography, and parents' attitudes toward teenagers' emerging sexuality," all of which manages to sound a bit like "Dr...

...And that is why the medical solution will win out—just because it is so simple and so narrow...

...And guess who could use a little therapy...

...Because she sees family attitudes toward sex as central to adolescent attitudes and family advice and support for a pregnant daughter as crucial, Oettinger emphasizes frank discussion between parents and their adolescent children, male and female, about sex and sexual values...

...It stretches credibility to think of NOW and the National Council of Catholic Bishops calling a public meeting to air these issues...

...The public health view has its origins in the human impulse to protect people, Commonweal: 310 especially young ones, from disaster, including those of their own making...