The Abstinence-only Era and the Welfare Reform Act of 1996

Once, when progressive sex educators were most influential in shaping state policy, the religious right had battled to keep sex education out of the schools. Janice Irvine, in her history of the religious right engagement with sex education, notes that the religious right opposed “talk about sex” initially, so that the battle was framed as between supporters and opponents of talk about sex in the school.1 To speak of something is to acknowledge it, to give it a name and face, to see it and make it visible to others, and so Christian conservatism in the U.S. sought to keep sex education out of the schools entirely under the false presumption that “ignorance is bliss.” But keeping young people “ignorant” and thus supposedly unaware of sexuality has always been a losing battle, and it became even more so in a media-saturated age in which youth could no longer be “protected” from sex talk. Consequently, by the 1980s social conservatives were beginning to follow a different tactic, one of supporting their own brand of sex education and working to ensure that it was translated into the law of the land. By the mid-1990s, Christian and social conservative groups had mobilized enough power to do just that-through an amendment to the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 funding abstinence-only sex-education programs in public schools, in cooperation with religious-based organizations and movements. The religious right’s construction of the “problem” of adolescent sexuality, with abstinence until marriage as the solution, would prevail in public policy and in public-school practice, beginning in 1996 with the passage of the Welfare Reform Act. Once more, sex-education initiatives would be tied to the “problem” of unwed welfare mothers, although the solution was not more access to family-planning services and contraceptives, or more opportunities for education and job training. The problem of young welfare mothers bearing children out of wedlock was located in the bad “family values” of single-mother families, and the solution was the re-establishment of a household headed by a breadwinner

husband and father-with abstinence practiced before marriage. This was a definition and response to the problem very similar to that advanced in the Moynihan Report on the “Negro family” in 1965, although this time it faced less opposition from established civil-rights groups. In fact, this message of “abstinence in preparation for marriage,” linked to the notion that the problem of the young welfare mother could be solved only through the re-establishment of a “traditional” twoparent, heterosexual household, was appealing to a broad spectrum of the black and Latino/a middle class by the 1980s. And it certainly reinforced the commonsense beliefs of many white Americans of diverse class backgrounds. This is what made the Christian right’s framing of the problem of adolescent sexuality so hegemonic, so dominating that it drove out almost all other framings of the problem. The commonsense wisdom of the Christian right’s framing of the problem and the solution to the problem was hard to resist. Young people should “wait” until the right person, their “true love,” came along (presumably of the opposite gender), and then they should get married and live happily ever after. If this has been a commonsense wisdom that appeals to many if not most adults-particularly parents-it is out of touch with the reality of adolescent sexuality, and it sets unrealistic expectations and standards for adolescents. In effect, it continues to treat them as if they are asexual children until they marry, when they are suddenly to become adults with sexual feelings and needs for intimacy. It fails to recognize that they might have rights to a sexual life, since they are not asexual children, but, rather, young adults. The power of the religious right had first been felt under the Reagan adminis-

tration, when the discourse of abstinence-only sex education first began to circulate in policy circles and take legislative shape. In 1981, Congress passed the Adolescent Family Life Act (AFLA) with a provision in it to fund abstinence-only and abstinence-onlyuntil-marriage family planning-an act that was quickly dubbed the “Chastity Act” by liberal critics. Demonstration projects had to counsel pregnant teens to choose adoption over abortion and to teach premarital abstinence.”2 They also were required to “involve religious and charitable organizations, voluntary associations, and other groups in the private sector.” Religious groups were even allowed to deliver a complete abstinence-based curriculum program for a school, complete with speakers, movies, and other curricular materials. The U.S. Supreme Court eventually upheld the statute, rejecting an argument that it would lead to an excessive government entanglement with religion.3 Congressional critics of the bill were at least able to ensure that the abstinence-only demonstration projects were funded at a low level (11 million dollars the first year). In 1993, an out-of-court settlement also stipulated that educational materials produced by religious groups for AFLA-funded programs could not include religious references and had to be medically accurate. As well, religious-based programs had to respect the “principle of self-determination” by referring teenagers to contraceptive services when they wanted that information, and they were prohibited from using church sanctuaries for their programs. This regulated and regularized the new relationship between the

religious right and the state; but it did not counter the growing erosion of borders, that once seemed so solid, between religious institutions and movements and the “state,” meaning here all governmental institutions and structures, including public education. These borders had been breached as early as 1981, and the Christian right was on its way to being a power player within the nation state. The Christian right had established a beachhead in federal educational policy, from which it was able to slowly extend its territorial claims. Which it did throughout the 1980s. The Christian evangelical vote was split in the 1992 presidential election, but the Democratic candidate, Bill Clinton, was able to win by capturing a large share of the evangelical, white voting bloc-largely because he came from a working class, Southern Baptist family and continued to profess his faith in public. Once in office, however, Clinton proved more liberal than evangelical Christians hoped he would be on social issues, and his support for comprehensive sexuality education found its way into a major piece of legislation in his first term, the Welfare Reform Act. In 1994, conservative Republicans gained control of Congress in part because of a backlash among Christian evangelical, white voters against a president whom they felt had let them down. With a new Congress elected in good measure because of its support, the Christian right insured that the section of the Welfare Reform Act funding comprehensive sexuality education was removed and replaced with a section mandating abstinence-only sexuality education. The Clinton administration bill had included a Teen Pregnancy Prevention

Grant Program in which 1,000 schools and community-based groups would have received grants in comprehensive sexuality education. The six-page summary of the grant program emphasized the importance of three interrelated ideas: “premature,” “delay,” and “developmental readiness.” In invoking a development approach to adolescent sexuality, the administration bill encouraged grant applications from programs that taught that sexual intercourse is “premature” for early teens, and should be “delayed” until at least the age of 16 or 17, at which point some are “ready” while others may not be. Much depended on the young person’s maturity level at any given age. The bill also mandated that equal attention be paid to the “delay of sexual activity” and the “prevention of pregnancy before marriage” (through contraception). It concluded that “programs that combine these elements have shown the most promise.”4 This was, in fact, a position on comprehensive sexuality education that mirrored that of SIECUS-which had been instrumental in helping shape the Clinton administration bill. In 1995, timed to gain support for Clinton’s Welfare Reform Act, SIECUS released its report of the National Commission on Adolescent Sexual Health, titled Facing Facts. On the commission were leaders from mainstream religious organizations as well as education leaders, health professionals, medical doctors, and scholars. Whereas it might be best (according to the report) for adolescents to abstain from sexual activity, the “fact” was that they were adolescents and sometimes let their impulses override what was best for them. And whereas it might be tempting to treat all adolescents as if they were not ready for sexual relations, the “fact” was that they differed developmentally, so

that what was good for one teenager was not necessarily good for another. The message and information conveyed in sexuality education had to be adjusted and modified, bearing these two “facts” in mind. To use the language of popular culture, we might say that SIECUS and the Clinton administration wanted a reality-based approach to sexuality education that did not expect adolescents to always live up to the ideal of abstinence. To “get real” also meant, from this perspective, being open to the possibility, and even probability, that some older, more developmentally mature adolescents will be engaging in relatively active sexual lives while still in high school. Once in power, Republicans were able to ensure that the SIECUS-inspired Teen

Pregnancy Prevention Grant Program in the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 was redrafted to mandate abstinence-only sex education. The new draft had been written with the help of the Christian Coalition and the Family Research Council, along with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.5 As Christian conservatives had sought to move their social agenda into public policy and legislation, they looked to think tanks like the Heritage Foundation to help them translate a religiousbased discourse on sex education into one that was secular, nonreligious, and legalistic. The Heritage Foundation could argue for the importance of public support for religious approaches to sex education, if the argument could be framed in terms of public interests and responding more effectively to public problems like teen pregnancy and welfare dependency. In a sense, religious conservatives hid behind a secular and, ostensibly, rational and scientific language, letting think tanks like the Heritage Foundation do much of the policy work needed to rebuild America around a return to traditional family values and religious faith. The religious right also found common ground with social critics on the right who were concerned about how-in spite of everything that had been written on welfare reform since the Moynihan Report in 1965-the welfare system kept getting larger and the Aid to Families with Dependent Children Program continued to grow. One obvious explanation-but one that did not appeal to those on the right-was that postindustrial America was a place in which millions of people could not find jobs to support themselves, in which young women of color with children were particularly vulnerable to being trapped in poverty, and that the only alternative was to let these millions slowly die on the mean streets of American cities. One set of solutions to welfare dependency was jobs with a living wage tied to job training and education, along with state-supported child care, and an end to discrimination against young mothers of color in the workforce. But these would all require expanding the role of the state, and taking on class, race, and gender inequities. The conservative solution was much simpler: bring back the “traditional” family to replace welfare dependency. The way had been paved for passage of the amended Welfare Reform Act by

a special Congress Assessment Project Study released by the Heritage Foundation in March, 1995, provocatively titled Combating Family Disintegration, Crime, and Dependence; Welfare Reform and Beyond. In 1995, as the report noted, nearly one out

of seven children in the U.S. was enrolled in Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), “with Uncle Sam’s welfare check serving as a surrogate father.” The welfare state had assumed the role of the absent father in a large part of the new American underclass, and had even played a role in breaking up families. This is all something that has to be acknowledged by liberals and progressives, but welfare is also essential to provide a basic quality of life to those who are members of the growing underclass of women in America, unable to support themselves in the new economy. The fact that two out of three black children in the U.S. were born out of wedlock, up 25 percent since the 1960s, and that increases in illegitimacy were also occurring among low-income whites, is also hard to dispute.6 But these numbers have to be understood in terms of the history of the break-up of black families in the U.S., and the fact that a high proportion of African Americans continued to be economically oppressed and marginalized in the new economy, which had a crippling effect on family stability. The Heritage Foundation report, however, put a whole different spin on these facts. The problem, according to the report, could be solved only by dismantling welfare, discouraging abortions, and teaching (or preaching) abstinence before marriage. All this was framed in the language of scientific evidence that abstinence-only programs work in reducing teen pregnanciesevidence that was hotly contested by supporters of comprehensive sex education. Scientific “evidence” was also marshaled to support the contention that abstinenceonly sex education was particularly important for young men from the “underclasses.” Here the authors of the report drew upon recent, very controversial and contested research by Charles Murray.7 Through an examination of available data on standardized test scores, Murray had argued that there was a new “cognitive underclass” in America, with welfare mothers at the bottom of the hierarchy of intelligence. A few years later, Murray, along with Richard J. Hernstein, published a book that was widely distributed, The Bell Curve, and that developed this argument through an elaborate analysis of test-score data.8 The brunt of the argument was that, in a meritocracy (as supposedly existed in the U.S.), the social elite is also a “cognitive elite” and the underclass a “cognitive underclass.” Over time in a meritocracy, and due to people’s propensity to choose sexual partners from within their own class, the cognitive elite and underclass became ever more unequal in terms of intellectual endowment. The result, according to this argument, was that the cognitive underclass was becoming less capable of caring for itself, and more dependent on the cognitive elite to take care of it. According to the report, “the very low cognitive abilities of the average welfare mother” underscored “the futility of reform schemes aimed narrowly at making unwed mothers employable and selfsufficient.” It was better for all concerned if they stuck to mothering, at least until their children were grown. But they need not be welfare mothers, encouraged to raise more children out of wedlock so they could get more support from the state. The solution proposed was simple: defer child rearing until the woman can have the financial and supposedly cognitive support of a husband. “It is very difficult,” the report concluded, “to raise a child while also working to support the family.”

Through marriage, the young woman could continue to be a primary caregiver for her children, with a husband as the primary income provider. If this commonsense solution to the problem may make some sense, it is also nonsense to the extent that (first of all) the days of the single-wage household are over. In the new economy, the “stable,” working-class marriage, with the wife at home as child-care provider and the father off at work at the factory or office, is no longer realistic. Secondly, it is a solution that seeks to restore the patriarchal, heteronormative family. Finally, it is a solution that does not address underlying structural economic and cultural realities. All that is needed, from this perspective, is a strong dose of morality and family values to overcome welfare dependency and the “epidemic” of illegitimacy. The report ends with the claim that “the battle against expanding underclass culture” was of utmost importance, and that religious institutions along with public institutions had to work together in holding young people to the same high moral standards.9 “For the well-being of American children and the safety of society, a moral sense of responsible parenthood must be restored,” and that was possible only when the parents were married and “committed to a life together,” and when they could “sustain a family without large amounts of ongoing financial support from the larger community.”10