Publicly funded family planning programs assist low-income women, many of whom are women of color, in realizing their reproductive, educational, and career goals. Conservative lawmakers have recently become increasingly active in passing laws that restrict the allocation and use…
This dissertation is based on the idea that reproduction is a central locus of contest in the Galilee. "Modernization"--in the interrelated forms of nationalism, economic transformations, medical regulation, new forms of social stratification, and changing gender relations--have…
Two of the central questions in the field of public health policy concern whether developing world states can overcome barriers imposed by weak socioeconomic settings to accelerate public health transitions through policy interventions, and by what mechanisms such policies appea…
In Taiwan, abortion ritual attempts to appease or rescue Yingling (fetus spirits), who are the spirits of fetuses that have died from abortions or miscarriages. Within most contemporary religious discourse, abortion is seen as an inappropriate means of ending a life. Yingling ar…
This research study examines the reactions to and perceptions of childless men and women to determine if the stigma of remaining a voluntarily childless woman is persistent across generations in a unique and diverse community when compared to the needs of a global niche communit…
Fears of a demographic crisis in China have led the Chinese government to relax its one-child policy to a two-child policy. Policies intended to reduce the cost of childbearing have not successfully raised the birth rate, and the government instead encourages women to take on th…
Forty years after Indonesia's Family Planning Program was created, the country continues to struggle to meet the reproductive health needs of some of its hardest-to-reach populations. Over the last decade, contraceptive prevalence has stagnated and unmet need for contraceptives …
This study examines the factors that determine the utilization of family planning (FP) and maternal-child health (MCH) services and the causal mechanism that operates at individual and household levels facilitating joint determination of these interventions. In many developing c…
The dissertation consists of essays entitled "Changes in Female Labor Force Participation in Brazil 1976-1990: Pushed by Need or Pulled by Opportunity?"; "How Do Family Planning Worker Visits Affect Women's Behavior in Bangladesh?" and "Is Doorstep Delivery of Contraceptives Equ…
Announced by President Ronald Reagan in 1984 as an executive order, the Mexico City Policy (MCP) is driven by ideological beliefs that U.S. taxpayer dollars should not support overseas family planning activities which attempt to discuss, promote, refer, or perform abortions. The…
The purpose of this study was to determine the nature of the relationships among health locus of control, health beliefs and family planning behavior among Middle Eastern women living temporarily in the United States. A correlational descriptive design was used. A convenience sa…
Grouping existing providers under a franchised brand, supported by training, advertising, and supplies, is a potentially important way of improving access and assuring quality to some types of clinical medical services. While franchising has great potential to increase service d…
Beginning in the 1960s fertility rates in India's southern state of Kerala declined significantly. For example, the Crude Birth Rate fell by 30%, from 38.9 in 1961 to 26.2 in 1981. The study reported on here examines the factors responsible for this trend from a perspective diff…
Background: Over 50% of the world lives in an urban area. The highest rate of urban population growth is in Sub-Saharan Africa, where fertility rates remain high. To slow population growth and improve health and well-being, family planning (FP) advocates argue for increasing the…
The Lady Health Worker Program (LHWP) is a national program introduced in 1994 by the Pakistani Ministry of Health with the aim of improving access to Maternal and Child Health (MCH) and family planning services in urban slums and rural areas. Utilizing the 2006-2007 Pakistan De…
This dissertation consists of three independent papers. The first paper analyzes the impact of work-life policies on representation of female faculty in economics department of U.S. doctoral granting institutions. In particular, this paper studies the relationship between work-l…