Abortion, adoption, single parenting

Abortion opponents are sometimes accused of having inconsistent beliefs, actions, and/or priorities. If they were consistent, they would regard spontaneous abortions to be a greater moral tragedy, or they would adopt more frozen in vitro fertilization embryos, or they would support more robust social welfare programmes for children and single parents, or so on and so forth. Nicholas Colgrove, Bruce Blackshaw, and Daniel Rogers have recently argued that such inconsistency arguments 'fail en masse.' They propose three main objections: The Diversity Objection, The Other Beliefs Objection, and The Other Actions Objection...

BACKGROUND: Various reasons have been cited in studies conducted in South Africa on why women legally terminate their pregnancies. We sought to determine the reasons for women to terminate their pregnancies legally and their contraceptive practices. This study was conducted at Soshanguve 3 Community Health Centre (CHC), located in a semi-rural zone in the north-west of Pretoria, Gauteng province of South Africa. METHOD: A cross-sectional study design was adopted in this study...

BACKGROUND: In Sri Lanka, motherhood within marriage is highly valued. Sex out of wedlock is socially unacceptable and can create serious public health problems such as illegal abortions, suicide and infanticide, and single motherhood as a result of premarital sex is considered shameful. The way unmarried women facing single motherhood reflect on and make use of their agency in their social environments characterised by limited social and financial support has consequences for the health and well-being of both themselves and their children...

BACKGROUND: Adolescents in Latin America are at high risk for unwanted and unplanned pregnancies, which often result in unsafe abortions or poor maternal health outcomes. Both young men and women in the region face an increased risk of sexually transmitted infections due to inadequate sexual and reproductive health information, services and counselling. To date, many adolescent health programmes have targeted a single determinant of sexual and reproductive health. However, recent evidence suggests that the complexity of sexual and reproductive health issues demands an equally multi-layered and comprehensive approach...

This study covers issues on advanced unwanted pregnancies in rural single women in South-east Asia, with reference to age, education, occupation, person responsible (i.e. baby's father) and reasons for delay in seeking assistance. It describes single women with pregnancy beyond the time for abortion, as set by the Indian abortion law. The study involved 314 girls/women and was set in the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences, Sevagram, India. The girls/women were admitted, provided with free facilities and had their babies looked after by hospital staff until given up for adoption, or otherwise...

PURPOSE: Solitary maternity is a significant problem of modern times requiring socio-economic and psychological, as well as perinatological studies. The twentieth anniversary of the Maternity Home managed by the Benedictine Samaritan Sisters motivated the present study. MATERIAL AND METHODS: Hospital discharge summaries of 429 women (group DSM) who lived at the Maternity Home between 26 July 1983 and 26 February 2002 were analyzed. This documentation was supplemented with hospital data on 177 women who gave birth at two Szczecin hospitals and on 13 who left the Home before delivery...

Teenage pregnancy prevention has long been on the American public health agenda. Over the past decade, a number of concurrent federal, state, and local policies have responded to the myriad and diverse needs of adolescents, from supporting adolescents who have not initiated sexual intercourse to strategies aimed at avoiding a repeat pregnancy among teenage parents. Key policies, including comprehensive family life education, access to contraceptive care, and youth development, have resulted in delays in sexual debut, improved contraceptive use, and have achieved reductions in pregnancies, abortions, and births...

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This article explores the sources of authoritative knowledge that shaped single, white, middle-class women's unintentional pregnancies and child-bearing decisions throughout five reproductive eras. Women who terminated a pregnancy were most influenced by their own personal needs and circumstances. birth mothers' decisions were based on external sources of knowledge, such as their mothers, social workers, and social pressures. In contrast, single mothers based their decision on instincts and their religious or moral beliefs...

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No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

This study sought the views of Chinese parents on sex education and contraception for unmarried youth. Data were drawn from 16 focus group discussions conducted in eight sites in China in 1998-1999 with parents of unmarried children aged 18-24. While parents tended to recognise the reality of changing sexual norms, they were ambivalent with regard to sexual activity among young people and the provision of services to them. To prevent this ambivalence from posing a significant obstacle to the adoption of safe sex behaviours by young people, the dilemmas faced by parents need to be addressed through programmes for parents...

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The growing number of couples seeking to adopt may have outstripped the number of babies in the United States available for adoption. Although increased availability and use of abortion have resulted in fewer single women continuing their pregnancies, the increased tendency of unmarried mothers to raise rather than relinquish their children has, in particular, limited the number of babies available for adoption. Despite the unpopularity of adoption among women with unintended pregnancies, addressing this option remains an important part of pregnancy counseling...

College students (N = 704) from two southeastern universities--one predominantly white and the other predominantly black--were surveyed by questionnaire to assess their order of preference of five methods for dealing with an out-of-wedlock, unplanned pregnancy: a) marriage, b) abortion, c) adoption, d) raising the child as a single parent, and e) having grandparents raise the child. Although, there has been a liberalization of society's attitudes toward options available to young people facing an unplanned pregnancy, results indicate that the majority of these students would prefer to marry, if possible...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Adolescent pregnancy and parenthood are increasingly common today and pose many problems for both the individual persons involved and society as a whole. For programs to address these issues successfully, factors associated with unintended pregnancy and resulting parenthood must first be identified and understood. This paper is a review of current research on the factors associated with the four steps leading to an adolescent becoming a parent. Being an adolescent parent requires taking a particular path at four crossroads: becoming sexually active, not using or incorrectly using contraceptives, carrying rather than aborting a pregnancy, and parenting rather than placing a child for adoption...

This paper reports on in-depth interviews with black and white unmarried adolescent mothers, from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds, about their pregnancy resolution. They revealed the importance of family members and other significant adults in the decision process. The analysis also indicated that personal, familial, and religious values were primary considerations in deciding to bear and keep their children.