Family Quiz

Angelica Ortega (580 words)

            In the first article I would be analyzing is "Pregnancy and Dropout: Effects of Family, Neighborhood, and High School Characteristics on Girls' Fertility and Dropout Status" which was written by Nathan Berg and Teresa D. Nelson. The article basically is saying that Hispanic women have a higher chance of getting pregnant in high school and end up dropping out. It wasn't really a surprising statistic but what made it so interesting was that back then they'd force teenager girls to drop out of school if they got pregnant. Of course, now through polices and all that it has changed so they encourage all girls to stay in school regardless if the get pregnant or not. 

            Measuring pregnancy you'd have gather data for years, and that's exactly a school in Texas did. They gather data for about 6 years, they had a cohort of girls and they'd measure all their test scores, attendance, how many did make it all the way to graduation, and if there were all drop outs. High school only lasts four years but some do take maybe one or 2 years after to complete high school, that is why the data runs up to 6 years total. In the end though what was discovered was the higher the age the higher the chances are of pregnancy. However with this being older girls did have an influence over the younger girls so there was an increase with their pregnancies too. It mostly depended on the neighborhoods, age, and ethnic family households that predicted the results in this experiment.

            Moving on to the next article that I wanted to analyze it was "The illegitimate and the illegal in the South African City: The effects of apartheid on births out of wedlock" written by Sandra Burman and Patricia Van der Spuy. It is pretty much about places in South Africa that had the most disadvantages and how they dealt with births out of wedlock. Now of course this study had to be record for a long time because of the history colored people had and so much had changed since the past 185 years. Their data however runs back up to about 45 years. This is what helped measure correctly since it was after marriage and other things became allowed to the people of color.

It was illegal to have children out of wedlock because of the apartheid era. It was legislation that strictly tried to reconstruct South Africa by using segregation. Colored people were made to live in rural areas. It was outlawed also to have sexual intercourse with those who were classified as "white". The whole point of it was to decrease the number of law broken since it was so common that people who weren't married was having lots of children. It wasn't so clear how they were going to go about making people wait until they got married to have children but there would be some form of consequence.

As both articles would say, depending on the time era and who specifically pregnancy rates would very much differ. In the first article the type of pregnancies that they were focusing on were teen pregnancies and the rates of being a high school dropout. The second article they target more women who had children out of wedlock, more specifically colored women. By the the era you could get the idea that these women were much older therefore, the rates were probably much lower.