Predicting maternal behaviors during pregnancy: Does intention status matter? Family Planning Perspectives 30(2

In the past decade, evidence has accu-mulated that women’s behavior during pregnancy can strongly affect the health of their infants.1 For example, maternal smoking and poor weight gain during pregnancy have consistently been shown to increase an infant’s risk of low birth weight.2 Nevertheless, very little is known about why some women avoid detri-mental behaviors and engage in beneficial ones, while others do not. A woman’s attitude toward her preg-nancy is likely to affect her behavior; how-ever, the standard measure of her feelings is an imperfect one—a postpartum report of how she felt before the pregnancy about whether and when she wanted to have a child. Still, this measure—intention sta-tus, which indicates whether the preg-nancy was intended or unintended— has been found to be related to pregnan-cy behavior.3 Research findings indicate that some dis-advantaged social and demographic sub-groups of women are less likely to engage in beneficial behaviors during pregnancy.4 Intention status also varies widely ac-cording to some social and demographic characteristics,5 and the subgroups least likely to carry out positive pregnancy be-haviors have the highest rates of unin-tended pregnancies. As a result, it is unclear whether the “effects ” of intention status ac