The abortion rate in the United States fell significantly in the latter half of the 1990s, particularly among teenage girls.  Between 1994 and 2000, the overall rate decreased 11 percent, from 24 to 21 abortions for every 1,000 women of childbearing age.  For teenage girls, ages 15 to 17, the rate fell from 24 to 15 abortions per 1,000 girls-a precipitous 39 percent decline.

(Source: Sara Kugler, "Abortion Rate Drops Significantly," The Associated Press/Yahoo! News, October 9, 2002; http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20021009/ap_on_he_me/abortion_survey_7.)  

"The greatest destroyer of peace is abortion because if a mother can kill her own child, what is left for me to kill you and you to kill me? There is nothing between."

(Source: Mother Teresa, Nobel Peace Prize Lecture, 1979, in Andrews, Robert; Biggs, Mary; and Seidel, Michael, et al., The Columbia World of Quotations. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. www.bartleby.com/66/, [13 October 2002].)

A number of child psychologists have expressed concern in recent years over the possibility that day care may weaken infants' attachment to their mothers.  Several studies of young children in day care have in fact established that the emotional bonds between these children and their mothers are frequently weaker and more laden with anxiety than those between young children cared for at home and their mothers.  Still, researcher Nina Koren-Karie of the University of Haifa wonders if her colleagues haven't been misinterpreting the data.  Perhaps, she recently hypothesized, the weak bonds between children in day care and their mothers reflect not the effects of day care but rather "the emotional make-up of mothers choosing day-care centers as opposed to mothers who choose to remain at home with their infants." 

To test her hypothesis, Koren-Karie analyzed the maternal attachment of seventy-six mothers, half of whom chose to place their infants in day-care centers while the other half chose to leave employment to be at home with their babies.   The results of this analysis tend to confirm her hypothesis: "while 83% of home-care mothers were classified as secure, only 61% of the center-care mothers were classified as such."  Why is there a significantly higher percentage of insecurely attached mothers among the mothers placing their children in day-care than among those caring for their children at home?  Quite possibly, Koren-Karie suggests, "insecurely attached mothers have more difficulty staying at home and contending with their infants' demands for attention, closeness and comforting than do secure mothers.  This difficulty might be connected with their tendency to cope with such needs in themselves by employing mechanisms of withdrawal and devaluation . . . or are preoccupied with their own unresolved childhood conflicts."   Among women for whom motherhood entails such difficulty, nothing makes more sense than placing their children in day-care while they return to full-time employment.  "Work outside the home," remarks Koren-Karie, "may be seen by these women as a safe place where they are not in conflict regarding their maternal home."