agonyaunt | (no subject)

DEAR ABBY: I am a 14-year-old freshman who had an abortion last year. I'm not sure who the father is, and I don't want to go through that again. I want to get birth control, but I'm afraid my parents or my older brother will find out. They would kill me. I already have a bad reputation, and I don't want a worse one by having someone find out I was pregnant (or could be again if I don't get birth control).

What would be the safest way for someone my age to get birth control? I know you'll probably say "no sex" is the best, but I enjoy it too much now. It's like a habit. Please help. -- GROWN-UP GIRL IN RHODE ISLAND

DEAR GIRL: I have never heard of a girl in this country being killed just because she had sex, so your fears about your parents doing that may be overblown. Your mom may not be thrilled with the news, but she won't kill you. You need her AND HER GUIDANCE.

If you continue on the path you're on, having sex with multiple boys, you may have more to worry about than becoming pregnant again. Some of the sexually transmitted diseases around today could cause you to become sterile at a time when you may want a child.

An organization called Planned Parenthood (plannedparenthood.org) can provide you with birth control. It can also inform you about STDs and how to avoid them. Because you feel you cannot stop yourself from having sex, contact Planned Parenthood as soon as possible, preferably before the next time you indulge your habit.

https://www.arcamax.com/healthandspirit/lifeadvice/dearabby/s-2792995

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is this kind of re-print from days of yore?

On closer reading, I think you may be right. The warning about "sexually transmitted diseases that may cause you to become sterile" is a marker of coming from the days before AIDS. Once I recognized that, the rest fell into place.

In the 1970s, Abby would probably have said "VD" rather than "STD." And in the 1990s she would have thought of AIDS. The OP refers to "habit" rather than "addiction," which looks like early 1980s. 40 years ago, teens could get abortions without parental consent. Abby hasn't heard of girls and young women being killed because they had unauthorized sex...well, those things used to be hushed up a lot more effectively. The original response probably had an address to write to Planned Parenthood, and the current editor took it out and put in the website. Abby also seems to be writing from a time when drugstores aren't eager to sell condoms.

Edited 2023-03-14 15:33 (UTC)

Yeah, the fact that there's no mention of STDs from LW and no mention of condoms at all makes me think this almost certainly has to date to the 80s. Surely? Surely even if there *was* a 14-year-old that sexually active who had never heard of condoms, in the modern day Abby would have noticed something more was wrong there?

In most of the 1980s she would have thought of AIDS. I think if it's a reprint it's from the 1970s (the phrasing sounds like that anyway) and they just changed VD to STDs.

I don't know, I could see this being the response up to the mid-late '80s - it didn't really hit mainstream zeitgeist until Rock Hudson in '85, the official "first case in a woman" was '84, condoms didn't really take off outside high-risk communities until the early 90s, and Abby was probably not at the vanguard of all that. Obviously it *should* have been in the forefront by the early eighties, but I remember it still being treated as a new thing in the early-mid-90s.

I started college in 1981, and I recall bisexual men having a tough time finding women who would have sex with them. Admittedly that was college, and I ran with a fairly outspoken group.

Now that I look at the chronology, ACT-UP and the Silence=Death Project were both founded in 1987, so yeah, you're probably right.

Yeah, in the 1980s AIDS was huge and central - to people who were in the communities it affected, or allies of them. Everybody else was busy pretending it didn't exist. :( I think there's been kind of a rewrite in the last ten years or so of the 1980s being the AIDS decade, because of course to the people who were involved it *was* - and everybody else wants to pretend they didn't pretend they didn't know.

I was a 14-year-old girl in 1982. I had never heard of AIDS. I wasn't sexually active, but I thought of myself as reasonably well-informed. I paid attention to public controversies. (I had, for instance, heard of "date rape.") The phrase "have a bad reputation," sounds like something my mother would have said; I don't remember if my classmates would have said "slut" or something else.

I thought we were talking about whether Abby would have been concerned about AIDS. But yeah, things like after-school specials about AIDS came later.