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Behind Closed Doors: Who Is Regulating Sex, and How
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12919 |
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BOOK WORLD
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5 / 1987 |
2,886 Words |
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Connaught Marshner
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THE REGULATION OF SEXUALITY
Carol Joffe
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986
166 pp., $24.95
In modern America there is a new and proliferating breed of person whose job it is to manage our sexuality: counselors at family-planning clinics. Sex has become so technologized that it is deemed the sphere of separate experts. Women of all ages and walks of life who have a desire to control the fruits of their sexuality while still enjoying its pleasures turn their footsteps to the same door.
What happens behind that door is the subject of Carol Joffe's book.
Why It Matters
How the door came to be there at all is the story of competing policy currents. The story is worth repeating because, for sixteen years now, the nation has had a governmental commitment at the highest levels - federal, state, and local revenues for family planning reached $442 million in 1981.
The commitment is not without consequences. For example, presently more than a million teenagers become pregnant each year, and the trend shows no signs of reversing. Statistically, the increase in teen pregnancy parallels the increase in teen-accessible clinics. In the Wall Street Journal last fall, Stan Weed of the Institute for Research and Evaluation reported a "fivefold increase in teen-age clients and a twenty-fold constant-dollar increase in funding - 50 to 120 more pregnancies per thousand clients, rather than the 200 to 300 fewer pregnancies anticipated by the Alan Guttmacher Institute."
The pro-clinic establishment tends to point out that the teen birthrate is lower. What that statistic conceals is the fact that the teen abortion rate is higher. In an era of diminishing governmental spending, we might ask how our nation got itself into a position of paying millions of dollars to supervise an increase in unmarried sexual activity that leads to a higher abortion rate. The question needs to be asked: Do we want to subsidize the increase by continuing to pay to undo its effects?
Joffe's Research
Carole Joffe does not ask that question, but she provides a considerable amount of information relevant to thinking about it. She approaches the issue involved in family planning and abortion with considerable scholarly remove. She has a particular thesis: Despite the debate over family-planning policy (a three-sided melee that rages among the family-planning establishment, the feminist movement, and the pro-family movement), policies that affect the choices many people make are created in clinics by what she calls the frontline workers, the counselors in the clinics. It is a valuable insight.
To study these policies, she spent a year going once or twice a week to a nonprofit family-planning clinic in a major Northeast city. This clinic is an affiliate of a nationwide federation of family-planning agencies (one wonders if it is Planned Parenthood). The clinic offers pregnancy testing, contraceptive services, abortion services, and has
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