title: The lesser shame: abortion among educated women in southern Cameroon.
abstract: Educated women in southern Cameroon both condemn abortion and practice it with some regularity. This apparent paradox arises because educated Cameroonian women use abortion as one of a set of strategies to manage the timing and social context of entry into motherhood. This paper is based on a body of research which included a demographic life history survey (N = 184), open-ended narrative interviews (N = 37), and participant observation over 10 months. The survey data included 61 reported abortions, giving a lower-bound estimate of the crude abortion rate of 19 per thousand woman-years of life. In southern Cameroon, sexual activity is socially tolerated in a wide variety of non-marital relationships, while childbearing is not. Thus, most of my informants, including those who reported having aborted, say that abortion is shameful; however, they view its moral and social consequences as less grave than those of a severely mistimed entry into socially recognized motherhood. That is, abortion persists in southern Cameroon because it is the lesser shame.
authors.affiliation: Department of Demography, University of California, Berkeley, 2232 Piedmont Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. johnsonhanks@demog.berkeley.edu
authors.forename: Jennifer
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Johnson-Hanks
mesh_terms: D000024:Abortion, Illegal / Q000208:ethnology*; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D032763:Behavior Control; D002163:Cameroon; D002410:Catholicism; D002755:Choice Behavior; D004522:Educational Status; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007407:Interviews as Topic; D033262:Narration; D011593:Psychology, Social; D036301:Qualitative Research; D040242:Risk Reduction Behavior; D012725:Sexual Behavior / Q000208:ethnology; D012752:Shame; D014930:Women / Q000193:education / Q000523:psychology*