Abstract
Although racial-ethnic disparities in rates of births unintended by women have received substantial attention from demographers, little is known about the dyadic pregnancy intentions preceding the births of White, Black, and Hispanic women in the United States. We use birth records from the 2011–2013, 2013-2015, 2015–2017, and 2017–2019 waves of the National Survey of Family Growth to identify multiple types of agreement and disagreement in the pregnancy intentions of female and male co-conceivers around the time of conception, and assess racial-ethnic disparities in the prevalence of each of these scenarios. Our results showed that while 55% of births in the US were intended by both sex partners, 19% were unintended by both, and 26% were conceived in a context of dyadic disagreement over pregnancy intentions. Net of demographic and family trajectory characteristics, Black and Hispanic women’s births were more likely to be the product of disagreement, where the conception was unintended for women but intended for their male sex partners. In particular, Black women had the highest probability of experiencing births that were unwanted for them but intended for their male co-conceivers. Our findings highlight the importance of measuring and assessing dyadic pregnancy intentions to understand key racial-ethnic differences in the circumstances leading to conceptions, and their potential implications for child, parental, and family wellbeing.
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Data availability
The 2011-2013, 2013-2015, 2015-2017 and 2017-2019 waves of the National Survey of Family Growth are publicly available online on a website managed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/index.htm).
Notes
In exploratory analyses, we compared the results from our analyses using this sample of all live births versus a sample of only those resulting from first pregnancies, and found they were virtually identical. Given that the associations of interest did not seem to vary by pregnancy order in exploratory analyses, we decided to keep all live births in our dataset, while controlling for order in all models.
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Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge support from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Center for Child Health and Human Development Grant P2C-HD041041, Maryland Population Research Center.
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Appendix
Appendix
Simplified classification of dyadic pregnancy intentions
Detailed classification of dyadic pregnancy intentions. The detailed classification of dyadic pregnancy intentions excluded respondents who reported that at least one of the co-conceivers was ambivalent (“Didn’t care”) to maintain the number of scenarios manageable for analysis. The excluded respondents amounted to less than 2% of births (n = 429)
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Caudillo, M.L., Kim, S., Lee, J. et al. Racial-Ethnic Disparities in Dyadic Pregnancy Intentions Preceding Births in the United States. Popul Res Policy Rev 43, 13 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-024-09860-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-024-09860-z