Back in 2001, law professor John Donahue and economist Steven Levitt made headlines with a study in theQuarterly Journal of Economics suggesting that legalized abortion may account for almost half the drop in the U.S. crime rates during the 1990s. Now a study by John R. Lott Jr. of the American Enterprise Institute and his colleague […]

Even researchers indifferent to traditional morality recognize that adolescent sexual activity entangles young people in serious problems. Pregnancy and Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs) are two problems that receive attention in a study of adolescents completed by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. To understand why some young people are more at […]

Public health officials have devoted considerable effort to understanding the lethal biochemistry of pediatric lead poisoning. Now medical researchers from Brown University are beginning to clarify the family dynamics of that distressing phenomenon. Toxic lead, it turns out, is less likely to end up in a child’s bloodstream if that child lives with a married […]

Commentators often dismiss concerns about family disintegration as a peculiar obsession of America’s religious conservatives. But the consequences of family breakdown are attracting ever more attention from scholars around the world. Indeed, those consequences received scrutiny from scholars from the University of São Paulo and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. In a […]

A growing number of American women are avoiding the maternity ward. The circumstances of America’s childless women receive illuminating attention in a study completed by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). This study highlights—among other things—the sterilizing consequences of irreligion. The NCHS scholars see a number of clear patterns in nationally representative data collected […]

The loss of marriage as a social ideal expresses itself in multiple fashions, including moves by researchers and governments to lump married persons and cohabitants into the same statistical (as well as tax and legal) category. In fact, some observers hope that rising levels of cohabitation will minimize or eliminate existing differences between the two. […]

Women increasingly comprise close to 50 percent or more of all students in law and medical schools, a trend over which the news media fawn as holding promise of gender equality in America. Yet a study by sociologists at Tulane University suggests that differences in the motivations, aspirations, and even academic performance of men and […]

Why women without a wedding band continue to bear children remains a puzzle, especially since research continues to demonstrate how such behavior disadvantages both mother and child. Exploring the maternal side of those disadvantages, a study by scholars at Penn State and Cornell reveals how young women who “jumped the gun” face handicaps in persuading […]

Mothers in any social circumstance can experience what physicians label “postpartum depression.” Yet, research suggests that single mothers are decidedly more vulnerable to such postpartum distress than are married mothers. To determine the prevalence of postpartum depression and its antecedents, a team of psychologists from the University of Iowa analyzed data collected for 4,332 new […]

In May 1914, a feminist entered the Royal Academy in London carrying a concealed meat cleaver to attack John Singer Sargent’s portrait of novelist Henry James. “I have tried,” the woman explained, “to destroy a valuable picture because I wish to show the public that they have no security for their property nor their art […]