Religious school grads likelier to have abortions

Post Reply New Topic

New study examines faith’s role in deciding to terminate a pregnancy

The killing of an abortion provider on Sunday raises again the extreme potential consequences of the nation's schism on this topic. It's a tough issue to reconcile on a personal level too, and a new study on the effects of religiosity on the decision to have an abortion reveals more inconsistencies.

Unwed pregnant teens and 20-somethings who attend or have graduated from private religious schools are more likely to obtain abortions than their peers from public schools, according to research in the June issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.

"This research suggests that young, unmarried women are confronted with a number of social, financial and health-related factors that can make it difficult for them to act according to religious values when deciding whether to keep or abort a pregnancy," said the study’s author, sociologist Amy Adamczyk of John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Adamczyk examined how personal religious involvement, schoolmate religious involvement and school type influenced the pregnancy decisions of a sample of 1,504 unmarried and never-divorced women age 26 and younger from 125 different schools. The women ranged in age from 14 to 26 at the time they discovered they were pregnant. Twenty-five percent of women in the sample reported having an abortion, a likely underestimate, Adamczyk said.

Results revealed no significant link between a young woman's reported decision to have an abortion and her personal religiosity, as defined by her religious involvement, frequency of prayer and perception of religion's importance. Adamczyk said that this may be partially explained by the evidence that personal religiosity delays the timing of first sex, thereby shortening the period of time in which religious women are sexually active outside of marriage.

Despite the absence of a link between personal religious devotion and abortion, religious affiliation did have some important influence. Adamczyk found that conservative Protestants (which includes evangelicals and fundamentalist Christians) were the least likely to report having an abortion, less likely than mainline Protestants, Catholics and women with non-Christian religious affiliations.

Regarding the impact of the religious involvement of a woman's peers, Adamczyk found no significant influence. However, Adamczyk did find that women who attended school with conservative Protestants were more likely to decide to have an extramarital baby in their 20s than in their teenage years.

"The values of conservative Protestant classmates seem to have an abortion limiting effect on women in their 20s, but not in their teens, presumably because the educational and economic costs of motherhood are reduced as young women grow older," Adamczyk said.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31048153/

My guess would be they are less likely to know about and/or use contraception.

Probably true.

the humiliation given to a woman for allowing themselves to become pregnant is why they seek to hide it. I was forced out of my home state by my family when I refused to have a "D and C", which what abortion was called back before it was legal, and I was not welcomed back years later because they still remembered.

it is terrifying to be caught by those types of folks, I have no doubt they would be traumatized enough to try anything.

I recall reading, I'm not sure where, but there was a study that found that kids who'd had abstinence-based sex ed were actually no less likely than kids who'd had more comprehensive sex ed to have sex outside of marriage, but less likely to use contraception when they did. Apparently, according to some reports, it's not down to lack of knowledge or availability so much as these kids having some kind of screwed up logic that says that if you don't use protection, you can pretend to yourself that you weren't planning to have sex, so it 'doesn't count'. Not proven, but it wouldn't surprise me if there were a connection.

It would make sense since kids from religious families would be under a lot more pressure by their families to follow the religious doctrines. People are going to have sex no matter what, that's a fact of life, but if a girl gets pregnant outside of wedlock, what it comes down to is which is more important to her, following her religion, or making her parents believe she is. It would be far easier to get an abortion and never tell your parents, letting them think that you're not "a sinner" rather than telling them the truth that you went against their wishes and did what they think is going to send you to hell.

If you've been taught to believe that your family will disown you if you get pregnant out of wedlock, I think you'd be more apt to do what it takes to make your family happy than you would if you know that your family will still support you. In some families, religion can be more important than family, it's sad, but that's the way it works sometimes.

That sounds like its the most likely answer, though I doubt its so much about hell as much as, what's a polite way to put it, they want their daughters to be 'proper' ladies; some pull it off find while enough cave to the pressures.

Hey if you don't want a baby don't have sex.

What if you're married?

or use a condom!

That's irrational. Abstinence isn't an acceptable choice for the majority of people.

My very conservative dad wisely went against the grain and (a) made sure we learned about birth control (including exactly what those failure rates are and mean) and (b) told us that he would absolutely love us and stand by us if we ever got pregnant - although he would probably yell and scream at first, but he'd get over it - but that if we ever had an abortion he would disown us.

Most parents at that time just told their kids "don't have sex and don't get pregnant or all hell will break loose." In that case, you have girls afraid to anything BUT abort. Quite sad.

Having sex is irrational.

A very large subset of human behavior is irrational. What are we, Vulcans? People will behave irrationally, and plans that don't take that into account will fail.

I doubt that. We're talking religious private school here, they are two a dozen. I went to one. it doesn't mean the students are believers.

I'm not religious, going to a religious school is not that uncommon. I might be more to to with ha fact that people who goes to snooty private school can end up acting like complete idiots because they snobs and are spoit for the most part.

I went to catholic boarding school with monks and everything because my dad was in the foreign office, it was hell.

Funny this is a evangelical came to visits once (the monks seem to be ok with him preaching), anyway he told the boys off for having pinups of half naked ladies on their walls.

This is why studies like this are cynical rhetoric with very misleading criterion.