Black-White Differences in Pregnancy Desire During the Transition to Adulthood

Abstract

This article explores race differences in the desire to avoid pregnancy or become pregnant using survey data from a random sample of 914 young women (ages 18–22) living in a Michigan county and semi-structured interviews with a subsample of 60 of the women. In the survey data, desire for pregnancy, indifference, and ambivalence are very rare but are more prevalent among Black women than White women. In the semi-structured interviews, although few women described fatalistic beliefs or lack of planning for future pregnancies, Black and White women did so equally often. Women more often described fatalistic beliefs and lack of planning when retrospectively describing their past than when prospectively describing their future. Using the survey data to compare prospective desires for a future pregnancy with women's recollections of those desires after they conceived, more Black women shifted positive than shifted negative, and Black women were more likely to shift positive than White women—that is, Black women do not differentially retrospectively overreport prospectively desired pregnancies as having been undesired before conception. Young women's consistent (over repeated interviews) prospective expression of strong desire to avoid pregnancy and correspondingly weak desire for pregnancy, along with the similarity of Black and White women's pregnancy plans, lead us to conclude that a “planning paradigm”—in which young women are encouraged and supported in implementing their pregnancy desires—is probably appropriate for the vast majority of young women and, most importantly, is similarly appropriate for Black and White young women.

How Education Shapes Women's Work and Family Lives Across Race and Ethnicity

“…We also take an intersectional approach, which requires us to wrestle with “categorical complexity,” or the expectation that within each category (e.g., education) there are social groups (college-educated or not college-educated) and then even more detailed groups (White college-educated, Black college-educated, Latina college-educated) ( Branch 2011 ; Hancock 2007 ; McCall 2005 ). In the United States, education, race, and ethnicity appear to play an outsize role in determining which women work, form and maintain lasting partnerships, and achieve their fertility goals ( Barber et al 2021 ; Barnes 2016 ; Damaske 2011 ; Dow 2019 ; Higginbotham 2001 ). Late baby boom women, as captured by the NLSY79 cohort, experienced simultaneously greater access to college education and the labor market and, for less educated women, diminished access to good jobs and to membership in nuclear families ( Branch and Hanley 2014 ; Furstenberg 2007 ; Wilson 2011 ).…”

Impact of a relationship‐based intervention, Love Notes, on teen pregnancy prevention

“…Many Black youth perceive either pressure to become mothers or an implicit norm that teen pregnancy is acceptable (e.g., Macutkiewicz & Macbeth, 2017). Such norms reduce inhibiting beliefs that could deter teen pregnancy (e.g., Barber et al, 2021) and in some cases enhance a desire in adolescent Black women to become mothers sooner rather than later (e.g., Secor‐Turner et al, 2011).…”

Warren Miller y el Modelo T-D-I-B de toma de decisiones reproductivas: Una revisión teórica

“…Actualmente, en colaboración con Miller, se están desarrollando investigaciones en EUA enfocadas en los deseos de tener hijos usando como base el modelo T-D-I-B que describen la evolución del deseo de embarazo de mujeres jóvenes durante la transición a la edad adulta (Barber et al, 2020). En Irán, el modelo T-D-I-B ha sido aplicado en los estudios sobre tomada de decisiones reproductivas basándose en el análisis de las motivaciones para tener hijos (Pezeshki et al, 2005;Ghazanfarpour et al, 2018;Khadivzade, 2018;Shoae et al, 2020).…”