Department of Sociology, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH 43403-0222, United States.
Soc Sci Res. 2012 Sep;41(5):1138-51. doi: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2012.03.002. Epub 2012 Mar 21.
Having an unintended birth is associated with maternal and child health outcomes, the mother-child relationship, and subsequent fertility. Unintended fertility likely also increases the risk of union dissolution for parents, but it is unclear whether this association derives from a causal effect or selection processes and whether it differs by union type. This article uses data from the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth to compare union stability after intended and unintended births in coresidential relationships. Results show that coresidential couples are more likely to break up after an unintended first or higher-order birth than after an intended first or higher-order birth, even when accounting for stable unobserved characteristics using fixed-effects models. The negative association is stronger for marriages than cohabitations, despite the overall higher dissolution rate of cohabiting unions. We conclude that unintended fertility at any parity is disruptive for coresidential couples in ways that increase the risk of union dissolution.
意外生育与母婴健康结局、母子关系以及随后的生育能力有关。意外生育可能还会增加父母解除婚姻关系的风险，但这种关联是源于因果效应还是选择过程，以及这种关联是否因婚姻类型而异，目前尚不清楚。本文使用 2002 年全国家庭增长调查的数据，比较了核心家庭关系中计划内和计划外生育后的婚姻稳定性。结果表明，与计划内的首次或更高序次生育相比，核心家庭在经历意外的首次或更高序次生育后更有可能解体，即使使用固定效应模型考虑到稳定的不可观测特征也是如此。这种负相关在婚姻中比在同居中更强，尽管同居关系的解体率总体上更高。我们的结论是，任何胎次的意外生育都会对核心家庭关系造成破坏，增加婚姻解体的风险。
