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Integrating ambivalence: Living with the abortion experience

Every year in America, nurses provide care to 1.5 million women before during and after abortions. While the procedure continues to be legal, the experience for women often remains secret, unshared and unexplored. A grounded theory approach was used to explore women's perceptions of the abortion experience and to investigate the processes women use to create meaning from the abortion experience over time. Parse's Man-Living-Health Model provided a theoretical orientation for this research. Subjects included six nulliparous women aged 25 to 37 who experienced a legal abortion between 1 and 12 years ago. Using grounded theory methodology, a phenomenon of Integrating Ambivalence was developed to describe the circular process by which women are reminded of the abortion experience, and re-evaluate their decision within the context of their lives. Using a variety of strategies, the women moved toward increasing integration of the experience while remaining, to varying degrees, ambivalent about the abortion decision and its consequences.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:arizona.edu/oai:arizona.openrepository.com:10150/291474
Date January 1989
CreatorsBrennan, Kathleen Searls
ContributorsBadger, Terry A.
PublisherThe University of Arizona.
Source SetsUniversity of Arizona
Languageen_US
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext, Thesis-Reproduction (electronic)
RightsCopyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author.

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