Desire for and to Avoid Pregnancy During the Transition to Adulthood
| Author | Yasamin Kusunoki,Paula England,Abigail Weitzman,Jennifer S. Barber |
| Date | 01 August 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12396 |
| Published date | 01 August 2017 |
A W University of Texas at Austin
J S. B University of Michigan∗
Y K University of Michigan∗∗
P E New York University∗∗∗
Desire for and to Avoid Pregnancy During the
Transition to Adulthood
Unintended pregnancies disproportionately
occur among teenage women, yet little is known
about the determinants of pregnancy desire
among this group. The authors use a compre-
hensive baseline survey and data on pregnancy
desires to investigate which unmarried 18- to
20-year-old women want a pregnancy, want
to avoid pregnancy, and report consistent
pregnancy desire and disinclination. Vari-
ables that positively predict pregnancy desire
generally negatively predict desire to avoid
pregnancy. Although most young women have
no desire and strong disinclination in most
weeks, childhood public assistance is a strong
predictor of wanting pregnancyand not wanting
to avoid it. Comparing nested models sug-
gests that the effects of childhood disadvantage
operate throughsocial environments where early
Department of Sociology, Universityof Texas at Austin,
305 E. 23rd Street, A1700, CLA 3.306, Austin, TX
78712–1086 (aweitzman@utexas.edu).
∗Department of Sociology, Universityof Michigan, 4116
LSA Building, Ann Arbor, MI 48104.
∗∗School of Nursing, University of Michigan, 400 North
Ingalls Building, Ann Arbor, MI 48109–5482.
∗∗∗Department of Sociology, New YorkUniversity, 295
Lafayette Street, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10012.
KeyWords: adolescent pregnancy,emerging adulthood, fam-
ilies and individuals in societal contexts, fertility.
pregnancy is less stigmatized. Young women in
serious relationships, who are depressed, and
who are not pursuing postsecondary education
have more desire for pregnancy and less disin-
clination, but little of childhood disadvantage is
mediated by these factors.
The vast majority of nonmarital teenage preg-
nancies in the United States are dened as
unintended, at least by some measure (Finer
& Henshaw, 2006). Some unmarried women,
however, actually want to become pregnant at
early ages. Because of a long-standing emphasis
on the consequences of unintended teenage
pregnancies (Casares, Lahiff, Eskenazi, &
Halpern-Felsher, 2010; Geronimus & Koren-
man, 1993; Levine, Emery, & Pollack, 2007),
these women have often been overlooked by
demographers. This has left crucial questions
unanswered about the determinants of preg-
nancy desires among women in their teens and
early 20s. Understanding how young unmarried
women who want an early pregnancy differ
from young women who do not is essential
for developing a more complete picture of
early family formation in the United States
and for rening theoretical models of preg-
nancy intentionality during the transition to
adulthood.
In this article, we focus on unmarried
women’s desires for pregnancy at ages 18 to 20
1060 Journal of Marriage and Family 79 (August 2017): 1060–1075
DOI:10.1111/jomf.12396
Desire for and to Avoid Pregnancy 1061
because this period is particularly important for
its density of decisions with substantial future
consequences—such as decisions about col-
lege, careers, relationships, contraception, and
early family formation (Arnett, 2000; Rindfuss,
Morgan, & Swicegood, 1988). Furthermore, it
is a time of great instability during which life
trajectories diverge sharply in ways that affect
future privilege and disadvantage (Rindfuss,
1991).
Toobserve the various factors affecting young
women’s pregnancy desires during this turbu-
lent time, we use the Relationship Dynamics and
Social Life (RDSL) Study, based on 2.5 years
of weekly longitudinal data from a sample of
women who were 18 or 19 years of age at the
baseline survey.This rich data set provides mea-
sures of pregnancy desires with the following
two important and unique strengths: They are
prospective (asked about the upcoming month)
and they assess both desire for and desire to
avoid pregnancy. This allows us to recognize the
complexity of pregnancy desires and to directly
examine whether and how the predictors of these
two aspects of pregnancy desire differ (Zabin &
Hayward, 1993).
Next we provide an overview of the most
commonly used measures of pregnancy inten-
tion, which, unlike those we use, are retrospec-
tive. We then review existing scholarship about
early nonmarital pregnancy and the determinants
of young adult women’s desire for an early preg-
nancy. Following this, we examine which char-
acteristics of respondents and their environments
predict prospectively measured desire for and
desire to avoid pregnancy and further assess
whether those factors predicting one also predict
the other.
E M
C P
I
Most existing studies of pregnancy intentions
rely on data that were collected after the birth
(or less frequently after pregnancy but before
birth) occurred. Often this information is based
on questions about whether a woman wanted to
become pregnant “right before” (National Sur-
vey of Family Growth)or “just before” (National
Longitudinal Study of Youth) she became preg-
nant. Although these questions attempt to mea-
sure feelings about pregnancy before it occurred,
because of retrospective reporting, it may be
difcult for women to disentangle their prepreg-
nancy feelings from their experience of being
pregnant or raising a child. Prospectivequestions
asked before the pregnancy occurs are therefore
more likely to accurately reect prepregnancy
desires (Koenig, Acharya, Singh, & Roy, 2006;
Williams, Abma, & Piccinino, 1999). In this
study, we use data that capture women’s desires
about pregnancy in the upcoming month and
thus represent intentions preceding a pregnancy.
Existing scholarship has also largely con-
ceptualized pregnancy intentions in terms
of a one-dimensional, bipolar scale that is
dichotomized. For example, the National
Survey of Family Growth and the National
Longitudinal Study of Youth ask women if
they wanted a pregnancy (right/just before they
became pregnant), without asking how much
they wanted to become pregnant or whether
they also wanted to avoid pregnancy. Likewise,
the Demographic and Health Surveys, collected
in developing countries, only ask women if
their last pregnancy was wanted.Even the
relatively large literature critiquing measures
of pregnancy intentions and suggesting that
women’s feelings about pregnancy are complex
relies on a single dichotomized bipolar scale to
describe such complexity (Brückner, Martin,
& Bearman, 2004; Jaccard, Dodge, & Dittus,
2003). Dichotomized or not, one-dimensional
conceptualizations of pregnancy desire ignore
the possibility that individuals can possess
both positive and negative feelings at the same
time (Miller, 1994, 1995; Miller, Barber, &
Gatny, 2013), despite psychological research
suggesting that the brain has two channels
for simultaneously processing positive and
negative information (Cacioppo & Berntson,
1999). The one-dimensional, bipolar approach
may therefore not fully capture pregnancy
desires.
The data we use for this study include the
following two bipolar measures of overall preg-
nancy desire: one assessing desire for pregnancy
(ranging from “none” to “high”) and another
assessing desire to avoid pregnancy (also rang-
ing from “none” to “high”). We call these two
measures “pregnancy desire” and “pregnancy
disinclination.” The inclusion of both measures
allows us to investigate consistencyin positively
and negatively stated pregnancy desires and to
assess the extent to which social circumstances
predicting desire for pregnancy also predict the
desire to avoid pregnancy.
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