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Abstract

This article—inspired by the relatively recent availability of a great variety of quantitative and qualitative evidence about disadvantaged single women’s decision-making about sex and pregnancy—proposes that future efforts by the state and cooperating entities take single women’s thinking more into account...Part II will set forth the current qualitative and quantitative data showcasing young and often educationally and economically disadvantaged single women’s thinking about the meaning of sex and reproduction. It will suggest that their testimonies reveal how they link sexual and reproductive choices with the goals of making a community for themselves, and taking a place in that community as a good citizen. Part II will also propose that this interpretation of what young women are doing helps to explain both why some government programs and messages are more successful than others, and why certain factors (e.g., parental connection, religiosity, and team-membership) predict lower rates of nonmarital births. Part II will also discuss current psychological and neurobiological evidence about the good of relationships—particularly those involving self-donation—for human flourishing. Part III will characterize the content of current government-sponsored speech about sex and pregnancy directed to the unmarried. It will conclude that this speech regularly fails to address, and sometimes even contradicts, disadvantaged young women’s community-facing goals. Part IV will suggest ways that state-sponsored speech and programs concerning the sexual and reproductive choices of young women might better reflect young women’s need to have a community, and to attain a certain status within it.

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