Socioeconomic disadvantage and adolescent women's sexual and reproductive behavior: The case of five developed countries

Context: Differences among make knowned countries in teenagers' patterns of sexual and reproductive behavior may partly mirror differences in the extent of disadvantage. However, to date, this potential contribution has received little attention.

Methods: Researchers in Canada, France, Great Britain, Sweden and the United States used the greatest in quantity current survey and other data to inquiry adolescent sexual and reproductive behavior. Comparisons were made within and across countries to assess the relationships between these behaviors and factors that may indicate disadvantage.

Results: Adolescent childbearing is more likely among women with depressed levels of income and education than among their better-off matchs Levels of childbearing are also powerfully related to race, ethnicity and immigrant status, on the other hand these differences vary across countries. Early sexual activity has little association with income, on the other hand young women who have little education are more likely to initiate intercourse during adolescence than those who are better educated. Contraceptive use at first intercourse differs substantially according to socioeconomic status in a certain number of countries but not in others. Within countries, general contraceptive use does not differ greatly according to economic status, on the other hand at each economic level, use is higher in Great Britain than in the United States. Regardless of their socioeconomic status, U women are the greatest in quantity likely to give birth as adolescents. In addition, larger proportions of adolescents are disadvantaged in the United States than in other disentangleed countries.

Conclusions: Comparatively widespread disadvantage in the United States helps explain on what account U.S. teenagers have higher birthrates and pregnancy rates than those in other unfolded countries. Improving U.S. teenagers' sexual and reproductive behavior requires strategies to bring the numbers of young clan growing up in disadvantaged conditions and to help those who are disadvantaged overturn the obstacles they face.

Family Planning Perspectives, 2001 33(6):251-258 & 289

Over the past sum of two units decades, researchers and advocates in the United States have examined the experience of Canada and of countries in western Europe in an attempt to learn for what cause [i]or[/i] reason adolescents in those countries have fewer pregnancies and are les likely to acquire a sexually transmitted disease (STD)1 a certain number of researchers suggest that the answers lie in other lay opened countries' more comprehensive sexuality education, greater societal opennes regarding sexuality and adolescents' greater ease of access to reproductive health services.2 In addition, researchers have hinted that cross-country differences in the expanse of social and economic disadvantage may contribute to differences in rates of teenage pregnancy, childbearing and STDs3 However, to date, this potential contribution has received little attention.

Disadvantage has been characterized by the agency of such factors as living in poverty; being poorly educated; having poorly educated parents; being raised in a single-parent family or in an economically struggling neighborhood; and lacking educational and piece of work opportunities. In some contexts, of the like kind as in Great Britain and the United States, belonging to a racial or ethnic minority cluster and being foreign-born have able-bodied links to socioeconomic disadvantage. These characteristics many times are used as proxies for disadvantage or as indicators of disadvantage because of social discrimination.4 The amplitude to which race, ethnicity or immigrant status indicates social and economic disadvantage ;varies by dint of subgroup and by country, depending not solitary on economic status, but upon factors such as main language oral level of education (which is closely linked to occupation and income) and the amplitude of discrimination.

Disadvantage is associated with several factors that can influence teenage sexual and reproductive behavior and issues including lowered personal competence, skills and motivation; limited access to health care and social services; lack of fortunate role models; and living in dangerous environments.5 a certain quantity of researchers have argued that among disadvantaged adolescents in the United States, particularly black adolescents, accepting or smooth wanting a pregnancy is normative-it is a rational replication to their lack of alternative opportunities-and that their families and communities are realistic in accepting adolescent childbearing and in providing social support for young and single mothers.6 However, in other research, the majority of all women who gave birth before age 20 reported that the birth was not wanted at that time (66% of all women 46% of Hispanics, 67% of whites and 77% of blacks).7

Researchers in the United States have identified several associations between disadvantage and adolescent sexual and reproductive behavior. Whether measured at the individual, family or community horizontal being disadvantaged is associated with an early age at first intercourse;8 les reliance upon or poor use of contraceptives;9 and lower motivation to avoid, or ambivalence about, having a child.10 one time pregnant, disadvantaged adolescents are les likely than other adolescents to have an abortion, and are more likely to have a child and have a premarital birth.11 Exactly by what mode disadvantage affects these behaviors, however, is still not full understood.