“And yet, in the sound of that applause I heard a wall falling, a thousand-year wall, a wall of sanctions that said: We as a society do not approve of teenaged unwed motherhood because it is not good for the child, not good for the mother, and not good for us.” Noonan continues, “The old America had a more delicate sense of the difference between the general (‘we disapprove’) and the particular (‘let’s go help her’).”