Educational Advantage and Unintended Pregnancy.

Abstract

Unintended pregnancies constitute nearly half of total pregnancies in the United States. The concept of unintended pregnancy is considered essential to demographers, public health practitioners and scholars, and other groups concerned with fertility patterns and promoting contraception. This dissertation combines quantitative and qualitative approaches to examine the role of educational advantage and disadvantage in contributing to the social patterning of pregnancy intention status in the U.S. This dissertation utilizes the following frameworks and theories on which to base its research questions: Colen’s stratified reproduction, Geronimus’s weathering hypothesis, and Pierre Bordieu’s concept of cultural capital. A critical literature and theoretical overview examine the contextual influences on fertility, pathways between educational advantage and fertility patterns, validity of pregnancy intention status measures, and empirical evidence from studies on unintended pregnancy. The quantitative study tests whether educational advantage in early life impacts the likelihood of unintended pregnancy among adult females using a nationally representative survey of young adults and multinomial logistic regression. I find that educational advantage predicts pregnancy intention of first births; specifically, high-advantage women were more likely to have their pregnancies classified as unintended. This finding suggests that pregnancy intention differentials by education emerge from early education processes that shape the desire to enter motherhood. The qualitative study examines interview data collected from a sample of women to explore narratives on early life, pregnancy, and childbearing experiences. These findings illustrate that pregnancy “intentions” are socially constructed and reflect multiple domains of personal aspirations and contextual circumstances. We also learn how and why women’s’ social location shapes their pregnancy experience and the variety of creative and resilient approaches to pregnancy and childbearing. Current public health and policy organizations inadequately address this nuanced concept. The dissertation claims that the occurrence and social patterning “pregnancy intentions” are not fully understood. Policies and programs aimed at decreasing rates of unintended pregnancy in the United States continue the convention of stigmatizing disadvantaged women and their reproductive outcomes. The social construction of unintended pregnancy also serves to ignore the dense interplay of structural forces that produce the diversity of ways in which women approach pregnancy and childbearing.