Family Planning Perspectives articles from September 1999

Family Planning Perspectives archives from September 1999

A Reminder That Human Behavior Frequently Refuses To Conform to Models Created by Researchers.
September 1, 1999... An investment company headed by Nobel laureates recently went so spectacularly into debt that the government had to rescue it, lest its failure threaten the entire global banking system. Explaining the situation, an observer noted that a series...

Pregnancy Intentions May Not Be a Useful Measure For Research on Maternal and Child Health Outcomes.
September 1, 1999... The findings of Trussell, Vaughan and Stanford raise serious questions for public health researchers who are seeking information about factors that affect maternal and child health outcomes. In trying to understand how women's pregnancy...

Ambivalent Feelings About Parenthood May Lead To Inconsistent Contraceptive Use--and Pregnancy.
September 1, 1999... During the last several decades, the concept of pregnancy intention has been used in many different research endeavors--to estimate "unmet need" for contraception, to make population projections, to examine couples' decision-making processes,...

Intended Pregnancies and Unintended Pregnancies: Distinct Categories or Opposite Ends of a Continuum?
September 1, 1999... If we assume that there is a distinct and identifiable entity known as an "unintended pregnancy," we need to ask whether women's retrospective reports provide accurate and unbiased information on their experience with this phenomenon. A growing...

Options for Measuring Unintended Pregnancy In Cycle 6 of the National Survey of Family Growth.
September 1, 1999... The intended-mistimed-unwanted classification of pregnancies was developed in analyses of fertility surveys conducted in the 1950s and 1960s. Those surveys were restricted to samples of married women. The traditional measures of intendedness...

Men and Women Have Similar Fertility Intentions, And Many of Reproductive Age Postpone Childbearing.
September 1, 1999... Men and women who are married are more likely to have a child than they are either to postpone having one or to not have one, according to analyses of data from a national longitudinal study.[1] People who cohabit are inclined to have a child,...

Pill Use at Age 40 or Older Reduces Chance of Hip Fracture After Menopause.
September 1, 1999... Women who use oral contraceptives in their late reproductive years have a greatly reduced chance of having a hip fracture after menopause, according to a case-control study conducted in Sweden.[1] Overall, ever-users of oral contraceptives had...

Teenagers Who Wanted Pregnancy Have Better Financial And Household Situations Than Other Young Mothers.
September 1, 1999... Adolescent mothers who report that they wanted to become pregnant are more likely to have an ongoing relationship with their child's father and are in a better financial situation two years after the birth than adolescent mothers who did not...

HIV-Infected Women Have Elevated Rates Of Gynecologic Disorders.
September 1, 1999... HIV-infected women are more likely than women without HIV to exhibit a range of gynecologic infections. In a sample of minority women in New York City, 66% of those with HIV had at least one gynecologic disorder, compared with 41% of uninfected...

Among Minority Youth, Females Have Less Sexual Experience Than Males.
September 1, 1999... Four-fifths of seventh-grade black and Hispanic young women are sexually inexperienced, compared with about two-fifths of their male counterparts, and the gap remains when background factors am taken into account. Among students of both...

Married Mothers Fare the Best Economically, Even If They Were Unwed at the Time They Gave Birth.
September 1, 1999... Marriage, no matter when it occurs, is an all-important factor that affects women's economic well-being once they give birth, according to data from two waves of a national longitudinal survey.[1] The economic situation of women who marry after...

Let the Buyer Beware.
September 1, 1999... HIV diagnostic kits intended for home use and sold on the Internet may provide inaccurate information about an individual's infection status, according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).[1] All of the kits the FTC tested on a sample of...

It's All in the Timing.
September 1, 1999... In most healthy pregnancies, the fertilized ovum implants in the uterus 8-10 days after ovulation; the risk of early miscarriage rises dramatically when implantation occurs later.[1] In a sample of 189 pregnancies, the first hormonal evidence...

A Weighty Issue.
September 1, 1999... The experience of 130 Texas adolescents using the pill or injectable suggests that many teenagers worry needlessly about gaining weight if they use hormonal contraceptives.[1] One year after adopting their method, 56% of injectable users and...

How Do Adults View Sex Ed?
September 1, 1999... Ninety-three percent of adults participating in a nationwide poll conducted in early 1999 support sexuality education for high school students, and 84% favor such instruction at the middle school level; fewer than half of the 1,050 respondents,...

The Yin and Yang of Obstetrics.
September 1, 1999... Audiotapes of 87 women's initial prenatal visit with an obstetrician revealed that male doctors spend more time and talk more with their patients on this occasion than female physicians.[1] On average, the 11 male doctors in the study spent 26...

New Light on Sudden Infant Death.
September 1, 1999... Analyses linking California birth and death certificate data show that babies whose mother had a placental abnormality have an elevated risk of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).[1] Of the 2,107 infants who died of SIDS in 1989-1991, 1.4% had...

Don't Worry, Be Pregnant.(evaluation of difficulties conceiving)
September 1, 1999... Women with long menstrual cycles may have difficulty conceiving during months when they are under extreme psychological stress, according to a Danish study of 393 couples seeking a first pregnancy in 1992-1994.[1] In cycles when women were...

Good Signs for Teenagers' HIV Risk.
September 1, 1999... High school students in some urban areas are becoming less likely to engage in behavior that could put them at risk of contracting HIV, according to an analysis of data from eight cities participating in the Youth Risk Behavior Study.[1]...

More Leeway for Medical Abortion.
September 1, 1999... A regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol proved highly effective in terminating pregnancies at 63-83 days' gestation among women in a British hospital.[1] Between June 1996 and December 1997, 253 women seeking abortion 63-83 days into their...

In Brief.
September 1, 1999... * Oregon's medical association has approved a resolution to allow pharmacists in seven counties to provide emergency contraception without a prescription. Under the proposed program, pharmacists would be required to recommend that women...

Trends in Sexual Activity Among Adolescent American Women: 1982-1995.(Statistical Data Included)
September 1, 1999... A series of national surveys conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins University charted a steady rise during the 1970s in the proportion of U.S. women aged 15-19 who had ever had sexual intercourse before marriage.[1] In 1982, the federal...

The Correspondence Between Intention To Avoid Childbearing and Subsequent Fertility: A Prospective Analysis.(Statistical Data Included)
September 1, 1999... Approximately three-quarters of all ever-married women spend at least 15 years at the end of their reproductive lives exposed to the risk of unwanted fertility (childbearing that is not wanted then or at any point in the future).[1] The...

Sexual Partnership Patterns as a Behavioral Risk Factor For Sexually Transmitted Diseases.(Statistical Data Included)
September 1, 1999... Sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), including HIV, continue to impair the reproductive health of American women and men. An estimated 15 million new cases of STDs occur each year.[1] The short-term and long-term consequences of contracting an...

Women's Experience and Satisfaction with Emergency Contraception.
September 1, 1999... Despite the widespread availability of highly effective methods of contraception, one-half of the pregnancies in the United States are unintended, and 28% of all pregnancies end in abortion.[1] Moreover, nearly one-half of the approximately...

Abortion Services in Rural Washington State, 1983-1984 to 1993-1994: Availability and Outcomes.(Statistical Data Included)
September 1, 1999... The availability of abortion services in rural America has declined steadily during the last 20 years. Nationally, the number of nonmetropolitan abortion providers declined 51% from its peak in 1977 to 1988. By 1996, 95% of nonmetropolitan...

Are All Contraceptive Failures Unintended Pregnancies? Evidence from the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth.(Statistical Data Included)
September 1, 1999... Unintended pregnancies occur all too commonly in the United States. Although their impact on individual women or couples varies, such pregnancies have been linked to a number of social and health problems, such as poor birth outcomes.[1]...