Abortions More Frequent for Private Religious School Students

By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.

There's an interesting new study reported in the June issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior showing that unwed pregnant teenagers and women in their 20s who attend or have graduated from private religious schools are more likely to have abortions than young women who go to public schools:

Researchers studied some 1,504 unmarried and never-divorced women ages 26 and younger from 125 schools. The women were as young as 14 and as old as 26 at the time they discovered they were pregnant. Some one quarter admitted having abortions, which researchers say is probably an underreported percentage:

Despite the absence of a link between personal religious devotion and abortion, religious affiliation did have some important influence. Adamczyk found that conservative Protestants (which includes evangelicals and fundamentalist Christians) were the least likely to report having an abortion, less likely than mainline Protestants, Catholics and women with non-Christian religious affiliations.

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