The freedom for planning whether to have children and when to have them is very important for the health of women. In the United States, rates of unintended pregnancies, inadvertent birth, abortion, and adolescent pregnancy are very different across racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines. These disproportions have intense short-term and long-term outcomes for women, their children, and society as a whole. Women who have unintentional pregnancies and give birth are more likely to receive inadequate or delayed prenatal care and have poorer health outcomes such as infant low birth weight, infant mortality, and maternal mortality and morbidity. To earn the best grades in your Business plans and creative work assignments you should choose an academic writing service that will meet your best writing needs.
Children born from unplanned pregnancies usually experience developing suspension and have inferior relationships with their mother. These risks of unplanned birth are expanded in teenage mothers, who experience increased the risk for pregnancy complications and are often forced to make compromises in education and employment opportunities that subsequently lead to poverty and lower educational attainment. Further, the children of adolescent mothers experience higher rates of neglect, behavioral problems, poverty, and lower educational achievement. Undesired or mistimed pregnancies therefore significantly impact the course of a woman’s life, and disparities in the ability to plan pregnancies as desired can contribute to the cycle of disadvantage experienced by vulnerable populations.
U.S. laws and policies restrict the access of low-income women, who are disproportionately Latina or African-American, to contraception, abortion, and other reproductive health care. Many government-imposed barriers impede women’s access to safe and effective modern contraceptives: obstacles to insurance coverage for reproductive health care; laws authorizing pharmacists and other health care providers to arbitrarily refuse contraception or other reproductive health care on the basis of moral disapproval; restrictions on access to emergency contraception (the “morning-after pill”); and school-based abstinence-only-until-marriage programs that suppress information about the effectiveness, safety, and proper use of modern contraceptives, and about access to them.
Thus 49% of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended; half of those pregnancies result in abortion. U.S. constitutional law currently requires that any restriction on abortion must allow for the procedure when it is necessary to protect the life or health of the pregnant woman. Abortion laws may not subject women to legally created health risks, by either (a) banning or delaying abortion when the pregnancy poses a risk to the woman’s health, or (b) requiring that a riskier abortion procedure is used. Despite this constitutional requirement, a recurrent theme of recent federal and state anti-abortion regulation has been the deliberate attempt to undermine constitutional health protections by passing laws that create health risks for women in both of these ways.
