In this issue.(Editorial)

In all regions of the developing world, women are at high risk of sexual and reproductive health problems. Many factors--individual, family and societal--make it difficult for women to obtain the information and services they need to reduce these risks. This issue of International Family Planning Perspectives examines how these factors play out in women's lives.

In the lead article, Fatima Juarez and colleagues examine changes in levels of induced abortion in Mexico between 1990 and 2006 [page 158]. Because abortion remains largely illegal and clandestine in Mexico, their calculations are based on numbers of women aged 15-44 treated for abortion complications in the public health system and estimates of the percentage of abortion patients who had complications. Between the two years, the abortion rate increased from 25 to 33 per 1,000 women, and the abortion ratio rose from 21 to 44 per 100 live births. Noting that total fertility declined from 3.4 to 2.2 children per woman during the period studied, the authors conclude that Mexican women who experience unplanned pregnancies are increasingly resorting to clandestine abortion. To protect women's health, they recommend broadening the legal criteria for abortion throughout Mexico, improving contraceptive and postabortion services and expanding training in the provision of safe abortion.

In an exploration of factors that affect the timing of first intercourse among young people in Nyanza, a province whose HIV prevalence is one of the highest in Kenya, Eric Tenkorang and Eleanor Maticka-Tyndale find strong evidence of the role of cultural norms [page 177]. Both males and females who rejected myths about HIV transmission and those who experienced less pressure to have sex were more likely to postpone intercourse than other young people. Moreover, cross-gender comparisons revealed an interesting finding: Although males are pressured to initiate sex very early, those who felt confident of their ability to resist the pressure were more likely to abstain than their less-confident peers. In contrast, belief in their ability to abstain was not associated with abstinence for females, who appeared to be influenced to engage in intercourse by social and environmental pressures. The authors recommend that HIV prevention programs focus on dispelling transmission myths and on countering the gendered pressures to have intercourse that young people undergo in early adolescence.

When social norms support early marriage and ...