[Abortion among female students and employees of a Brazilian university]. / Aborto entre alunas e funcionárias de uma universidade brasileira.

In Brazil, the subject of induced abortion is controversial and considered by some to be a serious public health problem. On the other hand there are little data available as to its frequency and general characteristics. The difficulty encountered in obtaining reliable information is to be explained by the illegality of abortion that inhibits women from talking about their experience, and most studies are carried out in hospitals and thus succeed in identifying only those women who have complications. A study was carried out in 1990, involving all the female graduate students and employees of a Brazilian university. Data was obtained through a questionnaire that was returned by mail, anonymously. This paper presents some of the results relating to the frequency of miscarriage and abortion in this population. Significantly more students than employees were less than 25 years old (85% and 13.7% respectively); fewer students were married or in a common-law union (11% of students as against 56% of employees) and four times fewer students than employees had never been pregnant (15% and 65%). Nine percent of the students and 14% of the employees had had at least one abortion. When only sometime pregnant women were taken into consideration, over half the students (59%) and 20% of the employees had had an abortion. Differences between the two groups were maintained when considered by age, both for miscarriage and abortion. Students of less than 25 years of age presented the highest percentage of abortion.

PIP: In Brazil, induced abortion is a controversial subject and some consider it to be a serious public health problem. There are few data available about its frequency and general characteristics. The difficulty of obtaining reliable information is explained by the illegality of abortion, which inhibits women from talking about it. Most studies are carried out in hospitals and thus identify only those women who have complications. A study was carried out in 1990 regarding the frequency of miscarriage and abortion in a population of female graduate students and employees of a university in the state of Sao Paulo. Data were obtained by mail through pretested questionnaires, 1992 of which were answered by employees and 937 by students anonymously. Significantly more students than employees were less than 25 years old (85% and 13.7%, respectively); fewer students were married or in a common-law union (11% of students vs. 56% of employees) and four times fewer students than employees had never been pregnant (15% vs. 65%). 9.7% of the students and 25.4% of the employees had had at least 1 abortion (p 0.0001). When only ever pregnant women were taken into consideration, 65.9% of the students and 38.2% of the employees had had an abortion (p 0.0001). In the age group under 24 years, 74% of students had had an abortion compared to 35.7% of employees (p 0.0001). In contrast, the respective percentages for the age group over 24 years were 56.7% and 38.8% (p 0.00591). Differences between the two groups both for miscarriage and abortion were maintained when considered by age. Students who were under 25 years of age presented a significantly higher percentage of induced abortion.

[The link between demographic events: a study of nuptiality patterns]. / La vinculacion de eventos demograficos: un estudio sobre los patrones de nupcialidad.

PIP: The author examines links between the timing of various major life events (including women's age at marriage and the spacing of children) and the economic and urban development of a society, using Mexico as an example. The focus is on marriage patterns. She finds that nuptiality influences rural-urban migration for women, as do age and socioeconomic factors and husband's employment status. Data are from the Mexican Fertility Survey for the period 1976-1977. (SUMMARY IN ENG)^ieng

[The intercensal comparability problems in the retrospective infant mortality statistics]. / Los problemas de comparabilidad intercensal en las estimaciones retrospectivas de la mortalidad infantil.

In infant mortality estimates, using the Coale-Trussell procedure with information from 2 successive population censuses of a country, reveals differences in the levels for the overlapping years of periods. This paper deal with this problem using the 1974 and 1982 censuses of Ecuador. The contribution of his analysis consists in demonstrating that infant mortality in a given year--estimated from a specific age group--is a weighted average between zero mortality--women declaring no deaths among their children and mortality with a value different from zero--women declaring some child dead. The weighing values are the age structure of women according to the condition of having dead children and corrected by the mean parity of the corresponding age group. Looking at the structure--women with or without dead children--of both censuses, a strong increase in the proportion of women without dead children occurred in 1982 as compared with the proportion in 1974. In order to eliminate this lack of comparability a reweighing was introduced in the 1982 information. New estimates were obtained, and these are much closer to the estimates obtained from the 1974 census.