The question of whether a young woman should be allowed to terminate a pregnancy without her parents' knowledge has been one of the most contentious issues of the post Roe v. Wade era. Parental involvement laws reach to the core of the parent-teen relationship in the highly contested realm of adolescent sexuality. This is the first book to examine in thorough detail the decision-making experiences of teens considering abortion. Shoshanna Ehrlich evaluates the Supreme Court's efforts to reconcile the historically based understanding of teens as dependent persons in need of protection with a more contemporary understanding of them as autonomous individuals with adult-like claims to constitutional recognition. Arriving at a compromise, the Court has made clear that, like adult women, teens have a protected right of choice, but that states may impose a parental involvement requirement. However, so that parents are not vested with veto power over their daughters' decisions, young women must be allowed to seek a waiver of the requirement. Integrating a wealth of social science literature, including in-depth interviews with 26 young women from Massachusetts who obtained court authorization for an abortion, the book raises important questions about the logic of a legal approach that requires young women to involve adults when they seek to terminate a pregnancy, but that allows them to make a decision to become mothers on their own.

An indispensable resource for students, scholars, and activists concerned about current attacks on abortion rights, this book offers an unmatched account of the emergence, consolidation, and consequences of the antiabortion movement's paternalistic abortion regret narrative. Abortion Regret explores the emergence and consolidation of the antiabortion movement's paternalistic efforts to "protect" women from abortion regret. It begins by examining the 19th-century physician's campaign to criminalize abortion and traces the contours of the women-protective abortion regret narrative through to the 21st century. Based on interviews, textual analysis of primary sources, and a content analysis of state antiabortion policy from 2010-2015, the authors argue that the contemporary rise of the abortion regret narrative has armed the antiabortion movement with a unifying and compelling strategy to oppose abortion through a woman-centered approach. In addition to covering the historical origins of our nation's criminal abortion laws, the book covers topics that include the origins and growth of crisis pregnancy centers, including recent efforts provide perinatal hospice services; an analysis of leading Supreme Court decisions on abortion; the emergence of the "pro-woman/pro-life" antiabortion platform, including its deeply religious roots; the infiltration of this position into the political and legal spheres in the guise of a secular rationale for limiting access to abortion; and an evidence-based rejoinder to the position that abortion harms women. Examines the historical continuity of the abortion regret narrative as a political strategy used to limit women's access to abortion Asserts that the abortion regret narrative is intimately tied to a gendered and paternalistic construction of women's divine role as mothers Examines the antiabortion movement's strategy to place the "grieving" mother at the center of its oppositional narrative Uses interviews, textual analysis of primary sources, and content analysis of state antiabortion policies to trace the growing impact of the abortion regret narrative Examines and reveals the antiabortion movement's calculated political motivation for using the abortion regret narrative as its primary strategy to oppose abortion rights

Starting with the mid-nineteenth-century campaign by the American Female Moral Reform Society to criminalize seduction and moving forward to the late twentieth-century conservative effort to codify a national abstinence-only education policy, "Regulating Desire" explores the legal regulation of young women s sexuality in the United States. The book covers five distinct time periods in which changing social conditions generated considerable public anxiety about youthful female sexuality and examines how successive generations of reformers sought to revise the law in an effort to manage unruly desires and restore a gendered social order. J. Shoshanna Ehrlich draws upon a rich array of primary source materials, including reform periodicals, court cases, legislative hearing records, and abstinence curricula to create an interdisciplinary narrative of socially embedded legal change. Capturing the complex and dynamic nature of the relationship between the state and the sexualized youthful female body, she highlights how the law both embodies and shapes gendered understandings of normative desire as mediated by considerations of race and class."