Original articleTeen Pregnancy Among Sexual Minority Women: Results From the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health
Section snippets
Sample
We use data from Add Health, an ongoing prospective study of a nationally representative probability sample of adolescents in Grades 7–12 during the 1994–1995 school year (see Harris [18] for study design details). To date, one in-school and four in-home interviews have been completed; data for present analyses came from the Wave IV in-home interview (2008; respondents aged 24–32 years) and Wave I/baseline. Add Health procedures were approved by the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill,
Results
Table 2 depicts the distributions of demographic and behavioral characteristics by sexual orientation. Most respondents (79%; n = 4,739) identified as heterosexual, followed by mostly heterosexual (17.6%; n = 1,013), bisexual (2.5%; n = 145), and lesbian (1.2%; n = 75). Almost 30% of the sample (n = 1,766) reported a teen pregnancy; bisexuals reported the highest proportion of pregnancies (46.7%, n = 58), and lesbians reported the lowest (17.8%, n = 17). Among those who had a teen pregnancy, a
Discussion
Previous studies have found mixed associations between sexual orientation and teen pregnancy. In our nationally representative sample, we found the highest prevalence of teen pregnancy among bisexuals and the lowest among lesbians, with heterosexual (28.4%) and mostly heterosexual (31.4%) females falling in-between. Bisexuals and lesbians were also more likely to have multiple teen pregnancies, though associations were nonsignificant. After adjusting for covariates and sexual victimization,
Acknowledgments
Special acknowledgment is due Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle for assistance in the original design of Add Health. Everyone who contributed significantly to this work has been acknowledged. Preliminary findings were presented as an oral presentation at the Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Campaign of North Carolina (APPCNC; now known as SHIFT NC) Annual meeting in June 2014, and as a poster presentation at the Population Association of America 2015 Annual Meeting in May 2015.
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Conflicts of Interest: The authors report no conflicts of interests.