Woman Between Islam and Western Society
3. Western Woman
~ 135 ~
women of childbearing age) plunged — down from
118 in 1960 to 67.2 in 1988, a nearly 50 percent drop.
By the early 1980s voluntary childlessness had
become so acceptable and common — among
married couples as well as among never-married
women — that one researcher estimated that
perhaps as many as 25 percent of the young women
of the 1970s would in fact
never
have children.
22
In
1990, four out of every ten American families
contained children, though the presence of children
was more common in families maintained by
women than either those maintained by men or in
married couple families.
Simultaneously, the number of legal abortions has
more than doubled. In 1987 in the United States,
13,54,000 pregnancies were terminated by abortion,
up from 5,88,000 in 1972. Approximately 70 percent
of the legal abortions are obtained by unmarried
women, and these women are concentrated in the
lower end of the income scales. Women with an
annual household income at the poverty line or
below account for only 15 percent of all American
women, but they account for 33 percent of the
women obtaining abortions.
