Educational advantage and pregnancy intention status: Indicators of advantage and its association with unintended pregnancy

Objective: To identify whether educational advantage is associated with pregnancy intention status outcomes. Methods: I used data from Wave I and Wave III from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). Add Health is a longitudinal study of a nationally representative group of adolescents who were in grades 7-12 in the United States during the 1994-1995 school years, designed to explore the health status of adolescents and health-related factors in multiple contexts. Wave III was conducted in 2007 and 2008 in which participants were ages 24 to 32. Preliminary results are based on a sample of 2683 women who reported pregnancies or sexual activity in the past 12 months, in order to examine whether indicators of educational advantage in youth predict the likelihood of reporting a pregnancy or birth as unintended (unwanted/mistimed) or intended. Associations were assessed using multinomial logistic regression. Results: I find that women who lived with two natural and married parents as a youth were 52.2% (RR = .478, s.e = .129) less likely to report a pregnancy as unwanted and 46.3% (RR = .537, s.e = .149) less likely to report a birth as mistimed. Of women who reported pregnancies, those with high college aspirations were 32% (RR = 1.32, s.e. = .164) more likely to report a pregnancy as mistimed. These results suggest that pregnancy intention status is a complex concept and that educational advantage, and perhaps social and cultural capital, may complicate its understanding, requiring further investigation of this relationship.