Sexist pet peeve: the persistent myth that women are all privately obsessed with producing tiny widdle babies. Working to debunk that assumption is a recent National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy study [PDF] which surveyed thousands of young Americans, aged 18 to 29, about their thoughts and perceptions about pregnancy. Guess which group is more likely to be “pleased” at an unplanned pregnancy? It’s not the one with the silently weeping ovaries.

In order to gauge the “surprise fetus” reaction, NCPTUP researchers first isolated survey respondents who claimed it was “very important or somewhat important for them to avoid pregnancy right now.” Then, researchers asked them how they would feel about an unplanned pregnancy:

If you found out today that (you were/your partner was) pregnant, how would you feel: Very upset, a little upset, a little pleased, very pleased, wouldn’t care.

Results: Staggeringly gendered! Forty-three percent of young men responded that they would be “a little pleased” or “very pleased” by the news; only 20 percent of women answered the same. Men also proved more comfortable with an unplanned pregnancy at an earlier age: Thirty-four percent of men 18-19 said they would be pleased. By the time they reach age 20-24, 42 percent of men said they would be pleased. And over 50 percent of men aged 25-29 would be pleased by the news. Remember: this is only among men who deemed it “important” that a pregnancy not occur at this junction.

Meanwhile, the percentage of women who would be “pleased” by an unplanned pregnancy stays steady at a low 16 percent all the way from age 18 to 24. By the time women reach the 25-29 age range, the percentage of “pleased” women soars to 29 percent. Despite the jump, women in their late 20s still lag behind their male counterparts by 22 percentage points. I don’t know: Perhaps our joy is muted by the fact that unexpected pregnancies tend to put us ladies out a touch.

Labels: culture, gender differences, heterosexual couples, men, pregnancy, women

posted by Eve at 1:33 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

The pregnancy was easy, the delivery a breeze. This was the couple’s first baby, and they were thrilled. But within two months, the bliss of new parenthood was shattered by postpartum depression.

A sad, familiar story. But this one had a twist: The patient who came to me for treatment was not the mother but her husband. ...

Up to 80 percent of women experience minor sadness — the so-called baby blues — after giving birth, and about 10 percent plummet into severe postpartum depression. But it turns out that men can also have postpartum depression, and its effects can be every bit as disruptive — not just on the father but on mother and child.

We don’t know the exact prevalence of male postpartum depression; studies have used different methods and diagnostic criteria. Dr. Paul G. Ramchandani, a psychiatrist at the University of Oxford in England who did a study based on 26,000 parents, reported in The Lancet in 2005 that 4 percent of fathers had clinically significant depressive symptoms within eight weeks of the birth of their children. But one thing is clear: It isn’t something most people, including physicians, have ever heard of.

Labels: animal research, Fathers, gender differences, men, mental health, pregnancy

posted by Eve at 5:02 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...Counselors and those who study dating, marriage and divorce say plenty of couples get married when they shouldn't. And their numbers may be increasing, because more couples are casually living together, which can complicate decisions about whether to marry, says Scott Stanley, co-director of the Center for Marital and Family Studies at the University of Denver.

Stanley says his research on couples who cohabit before marriage has found that "some of those wouldn't have married if they hadn't been living together."

"People have committed themselves before talking about the commitment to the future, and that can get you walking down the aisle not being sure that's the right thing, or what you want to do," he says.

Stories of people entering marriages they felt were doomed from the start intrigued Carl Weisman of Torrance, Calif., whose book, So Why Have You Never Been Married? 10 Insights Into Why He Hasn't Wed, arrived last year. He says a divorced woman he knows said something he thought was quite profound: "I didn't listen to my inner voice. I knew I was going to divorce him before I even married him." That led Weisman to thinking about others who went into a marriage knowing it wouldn't last. But he couldn't find any academic research on the subject.

So Weisman, 50, who recently married for the first time, surveyed 1,036 people across the country and conducted in-depth interviews with dozens more for his new book, Serious Doubts: Why People Marry When They Know It Won't Last.

Those surveyed had one thing in common: "They all ignored their inner voice," he says. "They knew it wasn't going to last." ...

Donahue, who cohabited before her 11-year marriage (which ended five years ago), says she didn't heed some early signals, including religious differences. Her parents also didn't approve of their living together without being married, which Donahue says encouraged her to wed. "I was thinking that we were in love and we're going to make it work. I believed in this whole fairy-tale thing on marriage."

Other reasons for proceeding in the face of doubts may also sound familiar – like pregnancy.

That's why Neumann, 26, a non-profit market researcher from Chicago, says she went ahead with it. "I had some concerns in the relationship, but I thought if I got married, we would grow together," she says. "I was 18 at the time and thought it would all work out in the end."

Others may think a partner is too good a catch to pass up – even though there's no spark.

Rasmussen, 51, an office manager in Boise, says she tried to convince herself that she and her second husband were a good match. They enjoyed many of the same activities, including travel. She had financial resources, yet he offered to help her with her kids' college expenses.

She wasn't head over heels, but he was attractive and generous, so Rasmussen told herself "You can learn to love this guy."

Labels: cohabitation, culture, divorce, Marriage, pregnancy, premarital sex

posted by Eve at 5:41 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

This is the last in my series of columns on out of wedlock births. By now you know that 4 in 10 U.S. births are nonmarital; this rises to 7 in 10 for African-American Women, and 5 in 10 for Hispanic women, our fastest growing minority population. Women in their 20s and 30s account for the lion’s share of the trend. …

Most of the state and private programs responding to nonmarital births over the last 40 years have poured their energies into “taking the baby out” of the sexual encounter via birth control. Abstinence programs, which are less common, try to teach young people how to avoid nonmarital sexual involvement. “Big-picture” efforts have aimed to boost young people’s educational and job attainments, in order to steer them toward a different future. While occasionally, policy experts have referenced the need to help young people think more healthfully about the meaning of their lives, including about the importance of their heterosexual relationships, no extensive efforts have ever been directed to addressing the intertwined issues I have surfaced above. For brevity’s sake, I would say these issues might be identified as: the moral weight of heterosexual relations; the public nature of heterosexual relations; the intrinsically parental orientation of heterosexual relations, and the crisis of fatherhood.

Also for brevity’s sake, as well as to get at the conceptual nub of my proposals, I would suggest that any response to these issues must “put the baby back into sex.” By this I mean that men and women need to acknowledge the overwhelming importance of heterosexual relations’ orientation to the procreation of children – helpless creatures who require decades of intensive labor, a lifetime of interaction, and who apparently come into the world with an inbuilt desire to remain connected to both their father and their mother. No matter the heights and depths of couples’ romantic aspirations and experiences, these can never be divorced from the crucial reality that heterosexual relations are procreative. The law has always known this. Most churches did or still do. And now couples must acknowledge it too, with help from every possible governmental, religious and other social institution. Once the baby is re-introduced into couples’ sexual consciousness, they can better understand that nonmarital sex has its own intrinsically public significance; the door is also opened for women and men to understand the “giftedness” of the other precisely in connection with procreation. They might further be open to the realization that men and women were literally “meant for each other,” meant for “communion,” and that what they can do together is more than the sum of its parts. This is a fundamental approach to helping men and women internalize a view of one another that is more respectful, more elevated, than what obtains today, especially among the most disadvantaged. Motherhood and fatherhood have not lost their fan base in these communities; were each sex to be helped to see the other, beginning in adolescence, as potential mothers and fathers, leaders of their children, of the next generation, and of their community, this might help to transcend current gender mistrustful stereotypes. Tantalizing indications of the possible beneficial effects upon young men and women of learning about their mutual procreative capabilities have come from “fertility awareness” programs like TeenStar.[6]

Who might act on the goal of “putting the baby back into sex”? And how might they proceed? The most likely actors are of course families themselves, churches and governments.

Labels: babies, culture, Helen Alvare, heterosexual couples, out-of-wedlock births, pregnancy, premarital sex

posted by Imapp Staff at 1:23 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

A pregnant mother will have to give birth to another couple's baby after a blunder by an IVF clinic.

Carolyn Savage had the wrong embryos implanted into her and will have to give the boy up to his biological parents as soon as he is born.

Yesterday Mrs Savage, 40, who was expecting her fourth child with husband Sean, said: 'The hardest part is going to be the delivery. I remember communicating with the [unnamed] mother of this child as to what I was envisioning and hoping for." ...

The couple decided not to have an abortion because of their religious beliefs, and have met the other couple and arranged a handover.

Labels: Artificial Reproductive Technology, motherhood, pregnancy, United Kingdom

posted by Eve at 2:36 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

There’s no doubt that Yalies are interested in sex. From conspicuously empty plastic baggies hanging in freshman entryways to Porn in the ‘Morn’s overflowing enrollment, signs abound that Yalies want to learn about it, watch it and even do it. Still, while drunken hook-ups and steamy relationships may be fodder for salacious Sunday brunch conversations, pregnancy, typically, is not.

But despite its lack of visibility, pregnancy is far from a non-issue on campus.

In fact, according to a News poll sent to 2,000 Yale undergraduates last week, one in three of the 281 female respondents reported having used Plan B at least once to prevent a possible pregnancy during their time at Yale. In addition, 20 percent of female respondents reported having believed they were pregnant at some point, while five students indicated that they had actually been pregnant. (Plan B is an emergency contraceptive that reduces the chance of pregnancy by 89 percent if taken up to 72 hours after unprotected sexual intercourse or contraceptive failure. Unlike the abortion pill, RU-486, it does not affect an existing pregnancy.)

Concerns about pregnancy are perhaps unsurprising, considering that, of the 55 percent of respondents who indicated they had previously had or were currently having heterosexual sex, nearly 20 percent said they either used ‘the pull-out method’ or no form of contraception at all.

Meanwhile, the most widely used form of contraception among the poll’s respondents was condoms, at 45 percent. Last year, Yale University Health Services provided 10,000 of them to undergraduates, said James Perlotto, chief of student medicine at YUHS.

Still, in actual use, condoms fail 11 percent of the time, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That is potentially 11 pregnant Yalies for every 100 who only use condoms to protect against pregnancy.

So what’s a girl to do if contraception fails, if she has unprotected sex — or if she winds up pregnant? ...

But even if Plan B is used, it is not 100 percent effective. Of the poll’s 281 female respondents, five reported they had gotten pregnant while at Yale — three of whom reported that they had terminated the pregnancy.

Labels: abortion, contraception, culture, pregnancy, premarital sex, sex

posted by Eve at 4:55 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT