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Compared with Britain, industrial transformation occurred more slowly in nineteenth-century France and Italy, forcing two early marginalists from the Lausanne school to pay continued attention to family poverty among the agrarian masses. Although Léon Walras and Vilfredo Pareto wanted to explain and resolve family impoverishment by securing a market whose outcomes correlated with what families deserved, the two economists diverged on the causes of family impoverishment, and on the best ways to respond. Walras’s ‘social economics’ rejected a popular view that family ‘immorality’ was the cause of family impoverishment, instead identifying badly designed government policy as the key factor. Pareto’s studies of population suggested the opposite position. Assuming government corruption and protective policies had been dismantled, Pareto assigned primary responsibility for poverty to egoistical parents, who should have anticipated cyclical economic decline before having children. Describing Malthus’s rejection of contraception as ‘not very scientific’, Pareto studied ‘people as they are’, finding families to be already limiting fertility through delayed sexual union or contraceptive knowledge. This suggested to Pareto that poverty would disappear spontaneously. Neither Walras nor Pareto explained how to manage existing family destitution or unanticipated economic crisis, and they did not problematise the many structural impediments to escaping one’s class.
This study aimed to evaluate the validity and reliability of the Turkish version of the Contraceptive Self-Efficacy in Women in Sub-Saharan Africa (CSESSA) scale.
Background:
Contraceptive self-efficacy is a crucial predictor of utilization of modern contraceptive methods. However, the existing tools for comprehensively assessing contraceptive self-efficacy are limited. Methods: The sample of this methodological study consisted of 510 female participants of reproductive age. The translation and cultural adaptation of the scale were performed. For validity, content validity and construct validity were tested. For reliability, test-retest reliability, Cronbach’s alpha coefficient, and item-total score correlations were evaluated. Findings: The goodness-of-fit indices showed an overall acceptable fit with the three-factor model. Cronbach’s alpha for the overall CSESSA scale was 0.867, and for the three subscales, it ranged from 0.77 to 0.84. The scale’s test-retest reliability was found to be r = 0.83 (p < 0.001), and the item-total correlations score ranged from 0.495 to 0.646. The Turkish version of the scale is a valid and reliable tool to measure the contraceptive self-efficacy of women of reproductive age. This scale can provide a comprehensive understanding of self-efficacy by assessing various dimensions of contraceptive self-efficacy.
The papacy played a central role in the development of Roman Catholic teaching about bioethics. Pope Pius XI’s Casti connubii (1930) condemned contraception, sterilization, and abortion. Papal teaching was broadly accepted by Catholics before the 1960s. Widespread dissent in the Church greatly increased after the publication of Pope Paul VI’s Humanae vitae (1968). The first successful IVF procedure in 1978 raised new bioethical issues relating to the status of human embryos outside the womb.
The Catholic hierarchy was more successful in lobbying politicians to enact restrictive laws, or obstruct liberal reforms, than in persuading the laity to accept its teaching on birth control and assisted human reproduction. A rift emerged between mainstream Catholic culture and the institutional Church. The Church is now circumscribed in meeting the challenges presented by complex ethical issues, such as surrogacy and assisted dying, because of the papacy’s inflexible stance on these matters.
This commentary analyzes the recent attacks on adolescents’ access to contraception by religious and parental rights activists and the conservative legal movement. Specifically, we focus on Deanda v. Becerra, a 2024 case in which the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held that a Texas state law requiring parental consent for minors to access contraception is not preempted by a longstanding policy under Title X of the federal Public Health Service Act that prohibits clinics receiving federal funding from requiring parental consent or notification. We first describe existing laws governing minors’ confidential access to reproductive health care, including the federal constitutional framework for parental rights, state parental notification and consent laws, and Title X, the federal law that provides federal funds to reproductive health care clinics for low-income people. We then examine and critique the Federal District Court ruling in Deanda, which elevated individual religious and parental rights over public health concerns, and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decision in that case, which undermined federal public health authority and jeopardized access to reproductive health care for low-income adolescents. Finally, we assess the public health and reproductive rights implications of restricted access to reproductive health care for minors and consider possible future directions and advocacy opportunities for reproductive, public health and legal advocates to promote continued access to contraception for adolescents despite mounting legal challenges.
Covert contraceptive use is a strategy to avoid unintended pregnancy. However, evidence regarding the multilevel factors linking past experiences of unintended pregnancy with covert contraceptive use is limited. The objective of this study was to identify the compositional and contextual factors associated with covert contraceptive use among women with a prior unintended pregnancy. Framed by the socio-ecological model, a cross-sectional study was conducted using data from Round 5 of the Performance Monitoring and Accountability 2020 project in Nigeria. Non-pregnant women aged 15–49 years who reported a previous mistimed or unwanted pregnancy were included (N = 1631). Multilevel logistic regression models with random intercepts were specified to investigate the relationship between covert contraceptive use and compositional and contextual factors. Approximately 4.54% (95% CI = 3.28–6.25) of women reported covert contraceptive use. At the individual level, having less than secondary education (aOR = 5.88, 95% CI = 1.20–28.72) and being single (aOR = 11.29, 95% CI = 2.93–43.56) were associated with higher odds of covert contraceptive use. There was no significant association between covert contraceptive use and the type of unintended pregnancy (mistimed: aOR = 3.13, 95% CI = 0.88–11.13). At the community level, living in a community with average poverty levels (aOR = 6.18, 95% CI = 1.18–32.55) and high exposure to family planning mass media (aOR = 6.84, 95% CI = 1.62–29.11) were associated with higher odds of covert contraceptive use. Measures of variation showed significant variation in covert contraceptive use across communities. Further research is warranted to better understand the underlying mechanisms in these observed associations and variations in covert contraceptive use among women following the experience of an unintended pregnancy. Additionally, there is a need to design family planning strategies that integrate community-level structures.
Enzyme-inducing antiepileptic drugs (EI-ASMs) such as phenytoin, carbamazepine, oxcarbazepine, and phenobarbital may decrease contraceptive efficacy. When considering contraception for women with epilepsy (WWE), the intrauterine device (IUD) is a first line choice. It is important to keep in mind that hormonal contraception with estrogenic components induces the metabolism of lamotriginePreconception counseling should be started early and revisited frequently for WWE of childbearing age. Pre-partum optimization of ASMs ideally should be done 9−12 months before a planned pregnancy. The majority of WWE are likely to have a safe pregnancy and a healthy newborn.
The Catholic Church notably condemns all forms of artificial birth control and advocates natural family planning as the only morally licit means of spacing births. This teaching is presented as the quintessential pathway to the fullness of human sexuality, but many Catholics struggle with it, and the magisterium itself recognizes that this path is not an easy one to follow. This article uses recent developments in Catholic moral theology around the notion of structural sin to examine the structural constraints complicating ordinary Catholics’ pursuit of their tradition’s vision for marital sexuality, demonstrating that larger structural forces can considerably affect the perceived viability of Catholic teaching on contraception. As a result, the article highlights the importance of linking Catholic sexual ethics and social ethics to provide a more credible vision for a more compassionate approach to married life.
This chapter charts the processes by which deceptive sex came to be regarded as potentially constituting rape. Through tracing these developments, the chapter shows how doctrinal features of the law, such as the way consent and deception are thought to be related and the modes of deception punished by law, were important to this process. Yet the chapter also argues that to fully appreciate how and why the changes occurred, it is necessary to pay attention to the array of interests the law has sought to protect and how these have shaped the range of topics of deception that might ground a charge of rape. This argument leads to the conclusion that, in the context of deceptive sex, deception has not been considered wrongful because it invalidates or precludes consent, as is commonly thought; rather, deception has invalidated or precluded consent because it has sometimes been considered wrongful. The chapter ends by introducing some reasons why this insight is important to ongoing debates regarding the criminalisation of deceptive sex.
This chapter summarises the overarching narrative of this book and argues that as was as being intrinsically valuable it can inform contemporary debates about using law to regulate the practices of inducing intimacy. The discussion is organised around three sets of issues: the public and private dimensions of sex and intimate relationships, including the interests protected by law, the form of response (i.e., state or non-state), and the variety of legal response (i.e., public or private); the structure of legal responses, the meaning of consent and its relation to deception, targeted modes of deception, culpability matters, the requirement for a causal link between deception and ‘outcome’, and the temporalities of the legal wrong; and the substance of deceptions, including the dynamics governing the range of topics about which transparency has been expected. Drawing the discussion together, the chapter concludes by offering a new framework for constructing legal responses to deceptively induced intimacy, which builds on the core insight and these responses have historically been predicated on temporally sensitive associations between self-construction and intimacy.
Edited by
Laurie J. Mckenzie, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston,Denise R. Nebgen, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston
Cancer treatments can induce temporary or permanent menopause and lead to persistent menopausal symptoms. In reproductive age women, cancer treatment may impair fertility but evaluating fertility and managing contraception can be complex. Managing menopausal symptoms and contraceptive decisions after cancer treatment can be challenging for women and their care providers. In this chapter, we present concepts for managing these consultations and some specific advice for women in particular situations.
During the two World Wars sexuality was fundamental to how both conflicts were planned, conducted, and experienced. The sexual body was an ever-present target of military policy as a potential polluter of the race, a danger to colonial order, sexual mores, or gender hierarchy; it was an object of intervention and mutilation, even annihilation. Nonetheless, war also offered opportunities for new, hitherto illicit sexual encounters. Individuals experienced sexuality in two opposing ways: as a source of immense suffering but also of erotic excitement and love. Changes in sexual attitudes, regulation, and practices must be understood through the filters of gender, class, race, sexual orientation, religion, and regional variations. Between 1918 and the `sexual revolution” of the 1960s a profound shift in sexual mores and attitudes took place in all bellicose nations. The millions of deaths on the battlefields, the suffering at home, the unprecedented mass movement within and between countries had sufficiently ruptured the social fabric to unleash a wide-spread liberalisation of sexuality. The steeply declining birthrate was the most dramatic expression of changing ideals. Yet, liberalisation was at best ambivalent as many traditional attitudes and regulations resurfaced and women and queer people struggled to fit back into a state-sanctioned `normal” life.
The decades since the Second World War have seen dramatic shifts in the approved varieties of sexual experience in liberal democracies. Sexuality, once regarded as an intensely private matter, is now on display everywhere, on large and small screens. Effective contraception has made what was once primarily a procreative act into a form of recreation, available to both heterosexual and same-sex couples. From being regarded as a privilege of marriage in the 1950s, today access to sex might be regarded as a right. An extreme form of this belief might be seen in the “Incel” movement. Cohesive community ideals about sexuality within marriage disintegrated in the post-war world responding to growing demands to respect a diversity of individual desires. Democracies which hold to faith traditions promote a more traditional view of sex as contained within marriage. The promotion of a responsible sex life has become part of the commitment of many secular liberal democracies to ensure the health and welfare of citizens, particularly in light of AIDS and HPV. Countries have put laws in place to protect citizens from sexual abuse. The global nature of the digital realm, however, makes sexually exploitative visual material difficult to police.
The structure, function, and even the definition of the family have varied tremendously from culture to culture, and for different social groups within each culture. They have changed over time because of internal developments or contacts with other cultures. Not all families centred on a sexual relationship, but most did, institutionalized as marriage, though in this there was wide variety as well. Norms and patterns of sexual familial relationships were how groups defined themselves, maintained their distinctions from other groups, and reinforced hierarchies within the group. Since the nineteenth century, scholars have developed theories of family and kinship, initially seeing evolutionary stages but now emphasizing variety and divergent lines of development, using qualitative and quantitative sources. They have still found major points of transition in family life: the foraging families of the Paleolithic became sedentary crop-raisers, with intensified social hierarchies; centralized states attempted to control reproduction through laws and norms governing marriage and sexual relations; patterns in family life became more rigid in classical cultures and text-based religions; colonialism and industrialization slowly altered family life and norms of sexuality; government intervention in family life expanded in the twentieth century. Today there is an increasing diversity of family forms around the world.
Sydney was the original site of British settlement in Australia and its largest city in the twentieth century. With a reputation for hedonism, Sydney’s identity became entangled, to a marked extent, in its sexual cultures. The preoccupation with whiteness ensured that attitudes to birth control were closely related to settler racial aspirations. State regulation of sex work and female sexuality was also connected to concerns about preserving racial vigour, but it helped to secure a powerful role for organized crime and police corruption in the city’s sex industry. Key Sydney sex radicals and reformers took their place in British imperial and, to an increasing extent, global networks. Gay (or ‘camp’) male subcultures emerged in the middle decades of the century and, after a period of greater freedom during the Second World War, attracted repression in the 1950s. Lesbian subcultures emerged more slowly, but were discernible by the 1960s. At the same time as the contraceptive pill was transforming heterosexual relations, Sydney emerged as Australia’s major centre of gay life as well as a place of notable ethnic diversity and sexual variety. By the end of the century the city’s identity was bound more tightly than ever to its sexual cultures.
This chapter attempts to explore global trajectories of birth control, family planning, and reproductive health and rights discourses in the modern world by comparing experiences of countries in the Global South with the Global North. Women all over the world have long had some control over their reproductive bodies. “Planning” became a very crucial concept within the global development discourse put forward during the post Second World War. One of the main resources that needed to be planned was population, thus “family planning” emerged as a novel form of population control. This ideology was supported by philanthropic institutions such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and by international conferences on population and development. Sri Lanka was a colony of the Western powers for four centuries (1505-1948), then a development “model” for South Asia in the 1970s, then the site of a civil war (1983-2009). Sri Lanka offers a more inclusive conceptual framework to understand how policy decisions taken in the Global North fails to have the same impact in the Global South. This chapter shows how policies must adapt to the local realities of the Global South irrespective of ratifying global population and development conventions.
This chapter finds in the Bible a diversity of views about sexuality, gender, marriage, divorce, celibacy, virginity, and the human body. It next traces in early Christianity an aversion towards same-sex relationships, abortion, and contraception, and a growing gynophobia combined with a growing devotion to the Virgin Mary. It discusses the association between sexuality and original sin, and between misogyny and the invention of the witch, together with the negation of sexual pleasure, the confinement of sexual relations to procreation within marriage, and the struggles of monks with their erotic desires. A painful incompatibility between the sexual practices of colonized peoples and missionary expectations and behaviour is noted. Through to the present time, different models of marriage and attitudes towards same-sex relationships are found within Christianity. The early diversity of views about sexuality is shown to be unresolved, re-appearing in the culture wars of the present century. While attitudes to cohabitation, divorce and masturbation are generally more liberal than in the past, global Christianity still retains a strong antipathy towards loving same-sex relationships, abortion, and even the ordination of women.
Sexually transmitted infections (STIs), along with sexual health and behaviour, have received little attention in schizophrenia patients.
Aims
To systematically review and meta-analytically characterise the prevalence of STIs and sexual risk behaviours among schizophrenia patients.
Method
Web of Science, PubMed, BIOSIS, KCI-Korean Journal Database, MEDLINE, Russian Science Citation Index, SciELO and Cochrane Central Register were systematically searched from inception to 6 July 2023. Studies reporting on the prevalence or odds ratio of any STI or any outcome related to sexual risk behaviours among schizophrenia samples were included. PRISMA/MOOSE-compliant (CRD42023443602) random-effects meta-analyses were used for the selected outcomes. Q-statistics, I2 index, sensitivity analyses and meta-regressions were used. Study quality and publication bias were assessed.
Results
Forty-eight studies (N = 2 459 456) reporting on STI prevalence (including 15 allowing for calculation of an odds ratio) and 33 studies (N = 4255) reporting on sexual risk behaviours were included. Schizophrenia samples showed a high prevalence of STIs and higher risks of HIV (odds ratio = 2.11; 95% CI 1.23–3.63), hepatitis C virus (HCV, odds ratio = 4.54; 95% CI 2.15–961) and hepatitis B virus (HBV; odds ratio = 2.42; 95% CI 1.95–3.01) infections than healthy controls. HIV prevalence was higher in Africa compared with other continents and in in-patient (rather than out-patient) settings. Finally, 37.7% (95% CI 31.5–44.4%) of patients were sexually active; 35.0% (95% CI 6.6–59.3%) reported consistent condom use, and 55.3% (95% CI 25.0–82.4%) maintained unprotected sexual relationships.
Conclusions
Schizophrenia patients have high prevalence of STIs, with several-fold increased risks of HIV, HBV and HCV infection compared with the general population. Sexual health must be considered as an integral component of care.
Catholic hospitals and health systems have proliferated and succeeded in American healthcare; they now operate four of the largest health systems and serve nearly one in six hospital patients. Like other religious entities that Wuest and Last write about in this issue, in their article Church Against State, they have benefited by and supported the long reach of conservative efforts to undermine the administrative state.
While the law has developed greater protection for the growing competence of adolescents, they have not been recognised as autonomous in the same way as adults. This difference in treatment is especially clear in medical decision-making. The law has been willing to accord young people the right to consent to treatment in their best interests, but has been far more reluctant to accept full adolescent autonomy, including the right to refuse such treatment. This chapter considers the assessment of young people’s competence to make decisions concerning their medical treatment. It then considers the authority of parents and courts to overrule adolescents’ decisions to refuse treatment. There are strong reasons to argue that parents should no longer have such authority, which is increasingly out of step with medical practice and developments in children’s rights. The jurisdiction of the courts to do so is well-established but will only provide an adequate safeguard if sufficient weight is placed on young people’s rights to bodily integrity and decision-making. The chapter concludes by considering the application of these principles in the context of adolescent’s use of contraception and abortion.
In 1928-29, politicians of the Irish Free State debated the Censorship of Publications Bill, which included a clause banning print media on contraception. They contended that ignorance of birth control would increase reproductive rates and prevent Irish “race suicide.” W. B. Yeats contested the Bill in the press, in part due to apprehension about Catholic population growth and dwindling Protestant numbers. This chapter positions the Free State’s “race suicide” debates into the context of their eugenic origins, and it argues that Yeats’s reaction to the Bill set the stage for his eugenic plan in On the Boiler, one that responded to what he believed was an Anglo-Irish “race suicide.” Through coded references to Irish class divisions, Yeats proposes restraints on Catholic reproductive rights, strategies of selective breeding among an Irish elite, and population control achieved through violence. His ideas about race and reproduction offer a study of scientific racism that reflects fringe and mainstream rhetoric that endures today in the form of “replacement theory.” An investigation of Yeats contributes to the ongoing, multidisciplinary effort to pinpoint the origins, development, and effects of theories that bring together questions of science, race, reproduction, and rights.