Discussion A:The Moral Dilemma of Abortion, Discussion B:Our Diversity
Discussion A: According to the article in Medscape Understanding Why Women Seek Abortion in the US.docx Actions studies have shown women who seek to terminate a pregnancy do so for reasons related to their circumstances including their socioeconomic status; age, health, parity, and marital status. Ethically speaking, the women were confronted with a moral dilemma, and based upon a womans situation; the choice could be morally justified. Would you agree or disagree? Please explain.
Discussion B: Based on the materials in this week’s module: What particular kinds of issues affect women of ethnic and racial diversity across America?
Materials:
http://www.mit.edu/activities/thistle/v9/9.01/6blackf.html
https://bust.com/feminism/14922-how-native-american-women-inspired-the-feminist-movement.html
https://www.asianamfeminism.org/
BMC Women’s Health
Understanding Why Women Seek Abortions in the US
M Antonia Biggs; Heather Gould; Diana Greene Foster
Abstract
Background The current political climate with regards to abortion in the US, along with the economic recession may be affecting women’s reasons for seeking abortion, warranting a new investigation into the reasons why women seek abortion.
Methods Data for this study were drawn from baseline quantitative and qualitative data from the Turnaway Study, an ongoing, five-year, longitudinal study evaluating the health and socioeconomic consequences of receiving or being denied an abortion in the US. While the study has followed women for over two full years, it relies on the baseline data which were collected from 2008 through the end of 2010. The sample included 954 women from 30 abortion facilities across the US who responded to two open ended questions regarding the reasons why they wanted to terminate their pregnancy approximately one week after seeking an abortion.
Results Women’s reasons for seeking an abortion fell into 11 broad themes. The predominant themes identified as reasons for seeking abortion included financial reasons (40%), timing (36%), partner related reasons (31%), and the need to focus on other children (29%). Most women reported multiple reasons for seeking an abortion crossing over several themes (64%). Using mixed effects multivariate logistic regression analyses, we identified the social and demographic predictors of the predominant themes women gave for seeking an abortion.
Conclusions Study findings demonstrate that the reasons women seek abortion are complex and interrelated, similar to those found in previous studies. While some women stated only one factor that contributed to their desire to terminate their pregnancies, others pointed to a myriad of factors that, cumulatively, resulted in their seeking abortion. As indicated by the differences we observed among women’s reasons by individual characteristics, women seek abortion for reasons related to their circumstances, including their socioeconomic status, age, health, parity and marital status. It is important that policy makers consider women’s motivations for choosing abortion, as decisions to support or oppose such legislation could have profound effects on the health, socioeconomic outcomes and life trajectories of women facing unwanted pregnancies.
Background
While the topic of abortion has long been the subject of fierce public and policy debate in the United States, an understanding of why women seek abortion has been largely missing from the discussion.
[1]
In an effort to maintain privacy, adhere to perceived social norms, and shield themselves from stigma, the majority of American women who have had abortions approximately 1.21 million women per year
[2]
do not publicly disclose their abortion experiences or engage in policy discussions as a represented group.
[35]
A review of several international and a handful of US qualitative and quantitative articles considered reasons for abortion among women in 26 “high-income” countries.
[6]
Of these, four studies (two primarily quantitative, one primarily qualitative and one that used mixed methods) were conducted in the US.
[710]
This review found that, despite methodological differences among the studies, a consistent picture of women’s reasons for abortion emerged, that could be encapsulated in three categories: 1) “Women-focused” reasons, such as those related to timing, the woman’s physical or mental health, or completed family size; 2) “Other-focused” reasons, such as those related to the intimate partner, the potential child, existing children, or the influences of other people, and 3) “Material” reasons, such as financial and housing limitations. These categories were not mutually exclusive; women in nearly all of the studies reported multiple reasons for their abortion.
The largest of the US studies included in the review, by Finer and colleagues,
[9]
utilized data from a structured survey conducted in 2004 with 1,209 abortion patients across the US, as well as open-ended, in-depth interviews conducted with 38 patients from four facilities, nearly half of whom were in their second trimester of pregnancy. Quantitative data from this study were compared to survey data collected from nationally representative samples in 1987
[1112]
and 2000.
[13]
The most commonly reported reasons for abortion in 2004 (selected from a researcher-generated list of possible reasons with write-in options for other reasons) were largely similar to those found in the 1987 study.
[11]
The top three reason categories cited in both studies were: 1) “Having a baby would dramatically change my life” (i.e., interfere with education, employment and ability to take care of existing children and other dependents) (74% in 2004 and 78% in 1987), 2) “I can’t afford a baby now” (e.g., unmarried, student, can’t afford childcare or basic needs) (73% in 2004 and 69% in 1987), and 3) “I don’t want to be a single mother or am having relationship problems” (48% in 2004 and 52% in 1987). A sizeable proportion of women in 2004 and 1987 also reported having completed their childbearing (38% and 28%), not being ready for a/another child (32% and 36%), and not wanting people to know they had sex or became pregnant (25% and 33%). Considering all of the reasons women reported, the authors observed that the reasons described by the majority of women (74%) signaled a sense of emotional and financial responsibility to individuals other than themselves, including existing or future children, and were multi-dimensional. Greater weeks of gestation were found to be related with citing concerns about fetal health as reasons for abortion. The authors did not examine associations between weeks of gestation with some of the other more frequently mentioned reasons for abortion.
While the US abortion rate appears to have stabilized after a national decline, this decline has been slower among low-income women and in certain states, suggesting possible disparities in access to effective contraceptive methods and/or economic challenges preventing women from feeling they are able to care for a child.
[213]
According to national estimates for 2005 and 2008, changes in the abortion rate varied by region, with the South and West seeing small declines, and the Northwest and Midwest seeing no change over that period.
[2]
Furthermore, the changing political climate and increasing restrictive legislation with regards to abortion in this country,
[14]
in conjunction with the economic recession, may be affecting women’s reasons for seeking abortion, warranting a fresh investigation into these issues. This study builds upon and extends the small body of literature that documents US women’s reasons for abortion.
[6]
While two other papers using data from the Turnaway Study (see below) describe how women who indicate partner related reasons or reasons related to their own alcohol, tobacco and/or drug use, differ from those who do not mention these reasons
[1516]
this study presents all of the reasons women from the Turnaway Study gave for seeking abortion, as described in their own words.
