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In the United States, the \"right to choose\" an abortion is the law of the land. But what if a woman continues her pregnancy because she didn't really have a choice? What if state laws, federal policies, stigma, and a host of other obstacles push that choice out of her reach?     Based on candid, in-depth interviews with women who considered but did not obtain an abortion, No Real Choice punctures the myth that American women have full autonomy over their reproductive choices. Focusing on the experiences of a predominantly Black and low-income group of women, sociologist Katrina Kimport finds that structural, cultural, and experiential factors can make choosing abortion impossible-especially for those who experience racism and class discrimination. From these conversations, we see the obstacles to \"choice\" these women face, such as bans on public insurance coverage of abortion and rampant antiabortion claims that abortion is harmful. Kimport's interviews reveal that even as activists fight to preserve Roe v. Wade, class and racial disparities have already curtailed many women's freedom of choice.   No Real Choice analyzes both the structural obstacles to abortion and the cultural ideologies that try to persuade women not to choose abortion. Told with care and sensitivity, No Real Choice gives voice to women whose experiences are often overlooked in debates on abortion, illustrating how real reproductive choice is denied, for whom, and at what cost. 

Despite the fact that, statistically, women of low socioeconomic status (SES) experience greater difficulty conceiving children, infertility is generally understood to be a wealthy, white woman's issue. InMisconception, Ann V. Bell overturns such historically ingrained notions of infertility by examining the experiences of poor women and women of color. These women, so the stereotype would have it, are simply too fertile. The fertility of affluent and of poor women is perceived differently, and these perceptions have political and social consequences, as social policies have entrenched these ideas throughout U.S. history. Through fifty-eight in-depth interviews with women of both high and low SES, Bell begins to break down the stereotypes of infertility and show how such depictions consequently shape women's infertility experiences. Prior studies have relied solely on participants recruited from medical clinics-a sampling process that inherently skews the participant base toward wealthier white women with health insurance. In comparing class experiences,Misconceptiongoes beyond examining medical experiences of infertility to expose the often overlooked economic and classist underpinnings of reproduction, family, motherhood, and health in contemporary America.

InDaughters and Granddaughters of Farmworkers, Barbara Wells examines the work and family lives of Mexican American women in a community near the U.S.-Mexican border in California's Imperial County. Decades earlier, their Mexican parents and grandparents had made the momentous decision to migrate to the United States as farmworkers. This book explores how that decision has worked out for these second- and third-generation Mexican Americans. Wells provides stories of the struggles, triumphs, and everyday experiences of these women. She analyzes their narratives on a broad canvas that includes the social structures that create the barriers, constraints, and opportunities that have shaped their lives. The women have constructed far more settled lives than the immigrant generation that followed the crops, but many struggle to provide adequately for their families. These women aspire to achieve the middle-class lives of the American Dream. But upward mobility is an elusive goal. The realities of life in a rural, agricultural border community strictly limit social mobility for these descendants of immigrant farm laborers. Reliance on family networks is a vital strategy for meeting the economic challenges they encounter. Wells illustrates clearly the ways in which the \"long shadow\" of farm work continues to permeate the lives and prospects of these women and their families.

Children with mentally ill parents are at risk of developing mental health problems themselves. To enhance early support for these children may prevent mental health problems from being transmitted from one generation to the next. The sample ( N  = 219) included health professionals in a large university hospital, who responded to a web-based survey on the routines of the mental health services, attitudes within the workforce capacity, worker’s knowledge on the impact of parental mental illness on children, knowledge on legislation concerning children of patients, experience, expectations for possible outcomes of change in current clinical practice and demographic variables. A total of 56 % reported that they did not identify whether or not patients had children. There were no significant differences between the groups (identifiers and non-identifiers) except for the two scales measuring aspects of knowledge, i.e., Knowledge Children and Knowledge Legislation where workers who identified children had higher scores. The results also showed that younger workers with a medium level of education scored higher on Positive Attitudes. Furthermore, workers who reported to have more knowledge about children and the impact of mental illness on the parenting role were less concerned about a child-focussed approach interfering with the patient-therapist relation.

Whooping cough still occupies a leading position in the group of controlled infectious diseases, despite worldwide mass vaccination. In recent decades, there has been a significant increase in the incidence of whooping cough and the spread of atypical forms among adolescents and adults. It has been proposed that the formation of an anthropogenic source of infection evolves due to Bordetella pertussis bacteria with reduced or completely lost virulence that are capable of long-term persistence in the human body and restoration of infectivity under certain conditions. The persistence mechanisms of the causative agent of whooping cough have not yet been studied completely. We hypothesize that one of the mechanisms may be a change of the bvgAS operon, which regulates the expression of all virulence genes of B. pertussis bacteria because of the integration of IS-elements. Mobile IS-elements are known to have the ability to both embed into the host genome sites and be cut out of them with the restoration of impaired functions. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the duration of persistence and to analyze the population composition of B. pertussis bacteria in children with whooping cough and contact persons in family foci. In this study, 80 children with confirmed diagnosis of pertussis and 116 people from 59 family foci of pertussis in contact with those children were examined. Patients were included in the study after they signed an informed consent. To detect B. pertussis DNA in nasopharyngeal swabs and to register IS-element integrations, the PCR-RT-IS test-system developed at the Gamaleya Research Institute was used along with nested PCR and sequencing. It has been shown to be possible to detect the causative agent of whooping cough in patients at different stages of the disease and in family members who have been in contact with patients for a long period. It has been found that, in the period of convalescence from whooping cough, the formation of insertional avirulent mutants of B. pertussis in the upper respiratory tract, which are capable of long-term persistence in the human body, is observed in 25% of patients. The appearance of avirulent mutants has been registered at a lower frequency (15%) in contact persons from family foci. The long-term detection of the causative agent of whooping cough and the registration of B. pertussis bvg -mutants containing the integration of IS-elements in bacterial carriers confirm the hypothesis that bacterial transition to persistence because of the insertional inactivation of bvg AS operon is possible. Identifying persistent B. pertussis bacteria and studying the mechanisms of their formation is important for creating new vaccination strategies and improvement of pertussis vaccines.

A longstanding notion in labor market theory is that women accommodate family responsibilities in their occupational and job choices. Utilizing a survey of newly graduated highly educated men and women in five occupations in Sweden (n≈2400), the article explores whether men and women differ in their professional strategies and if such differences produce early career wage gaps. Findings based on OLS regressions show that women express dual commitment to work and family; compared with men, they value ‘family-friendly’ work-conditions higher but do not value wages and career lower. Parenthood is not related to lower levels of career focus, but neutralizes occupational differences in family focus for women. Despite the select sample, women have lower wages than men, but the wage gap is not explained by different prioritization of family/career. The findings suggest that assumptions about gendered skill investments must be empirically scrutinized and theories further developed.

The Morality of Spin explores the ethics of political rhetoric crafted to persuade and possibly manipulate potential voters. Based on extensive insider interviews with leaders of Focus on the Family, one of the most powerful Christian right organizations in America, Nathaniel Klemp asks whether the tactic of tailoring a message to a particular audience is politically legitimate or amounts to democratic malpractice. Klemp’s nuanced assessment, highlighting both democratic vices and virtues of the political rhetoric, provides a welcome contribution to recent scholarship on deliberative democracy, rhetoric, and the growing empirical literature on the American Christian right.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Life of the Family Simulating the Life Course of a Model Family Glimpsing the Life Course of Real Families Coming to the End of the Life Course Further Reading

The 1950s religious boom was organized around the male-breadwinner lifestyle in the burgeoning postwar suburbs. But since the 1950s, family life has been fundamentally reconfigured in the United States. How do religion and family fit together today? This book examines how religious congregations in America have responded to changes in family structure, and how families participate in local religious life. Based on a study of congregations and community residents in upstate New York, sociologist Penny Edgell argues that while some religious groups may be nostalgic for the Ozzie and Harriet days, others are changing, knowing that fewer and fewer families fit this traditional pattern. In order to keep members with nontraditional family arrangements within the congregation, these innovators have sought to emphasize individual freedom and personal spirituality and actively to welcome single adults and those from nontraditional families. Edgell shows that mothers and fathers seek involvement in congregations for different reasons. Men tend to think of congregations as social support structures, and to get involved as a means of participating in the lives of their children. Women, by contrast, are more often motivated by the quest for religious experience, and can adapt more readily to pluralist ideas about family structure. This, Edgell concludes, may explain the attraction of men to more conservative congregations, and women to nontraditional religious groups.

Through a probing investigation of conservative Christianity and its response to an issue that, according to the statistics of conservative Christian groups, affects only a small number of Americans, Ludger Viefhues-Bailey alights on a profound theological conundrum: in today's conservative Christian movement, both sexes are called upon to be at once assertive and submissive, masculine and feminine, not only within the home but also within the church, society, and the state. Therefore the arguments of conservative Christians against same-sex marriage involve more than literal readings of the Bible or nostalgia for simple gender roles. Focusing primarily on texts produced by Focus on the Family, a leading media and ministry organization informing conservative Christian culture, Viefhues-Bailey identifies two distinct ideas of male homosexuality: gender-disturbed and passive; and oversexed, strongly masculine, and aggressive. These homosexualities enable a complex ideal of Christian masculinity in which men are encouraged to be assertive toward the world while also being submissive toward God and family. This web of sexual contradiction influences the flow of power between the sexes and within the state. It joins notions of sexual equality to claims of \"natural\" difference, establishing a fraught basis for respectable romantic marriage. Heterosexual union is then treated as emblematic of, if not essential to, the success of American political lifeyet far from creating gender stability, these tensions produce an endless striving for balance. Viefhues-Bailey's final, brilliant move is to connect the desire for stability to the conservative Christian movement's strategies of political power.