"Hi, my name is Mindy. I was born in 1965 and raised by my mother, a very liberal woman who just like a lot of women in the 1970 experienced the sexual revolution of the 70's. I'm writing because I am curious to know if the increase in abortion could be attributed to society's thoughts during the sexual revolution that occurred during the 60 and 70's. Sex was thought to be normal and OK. Everyone was doing it, as opposed to teaching girls about being a "good girl" or "bad girl" I'd like to know if there were any statistics kept regarding the percentages of girls who became pregnant in the 30, 40, 40's and early 60's and a percentage of those unplanned pregnancies that ended in a wedding, illegal abortion or adoption.
I guess in a nutshell, what I am trying to figure out, is if the sexual revolution possibly played a negative effect on the increase in number of girls who got pregnant and had abortions as opposed to marriage and or adoption and if so, had the sexual revolution not occurred, and girls were concerned about being considered "good girls" or "bad girls" would there be a lower incidence of teenage sexual activities and thus unplanned pregnancies resulting in abortion.
Mindy
My answer:
I do not have any statistics. However, what I believe is that a lot of girls got pregnant in the 1950s and gave away their babies for adoption. I have been directly involved in finding the birth mothers of two children born and given away for adoption in 1956 and 1957. More than one million white babies were given away for adoption in the 1950s.
After the US Supreme Court legalized abortions, sex became more popular and few babies were given away for adoption. By 1966 or 1967, the Sexual Revolution was in full swing and almost all girls were on the pill. Sex was plentiful. Everybody did it. Few babies were born.
By the early to mid-1970s, sex was so common that if you had a date with a girl, it was virtually guaranteed that you were going to sleep with her at the end of the date. However, all were on the pill. The birth rate among upper and middle class educated white girls just about dropped to zero.
In the late 1970s, the pendulum started to swing back again and having babies started to become fashionable again. Many childless women now in their 30s started having them. My first two children were born in 1978 and 1979. That was when having babies started to become popular again. My then wife was born in 1944 and so was 34 when her first child was born. All of her girlfriends her age were childless and were trying to get pregnant then too.
In the late 1980s, everybody got scared of AIDS. Everybody stopped having sex. There was no sex in America any more.
Nowadays, people are no longer so afraid of AIDS and sex is on the upswing again, in my opinion. There is lots of sex going on now, I believe. Also, oral sex, which has always been popular, is now more popular than ever before.
Still, white, American, college-educated girls are not having many children. They are having sex with boys but are not getting pregnant. Many if not most of the children now being born are being born to foreign mothers who have recently arrived in America. There are now millions of children in America born to American fathers but foreign born mothers. My own eight children are examples of this. This is likely to change the demographics of America.
Sam Sloan