Pathways to Single Motherhood: Sexual Intercourse, Adoption, and Donor Insemination

Abstract

Exploratory quantitative and qualitative analyses were used to compare the perceptions of premotherhood preparation and the means of coping with motherhood among three groups of single mothers (those who conceived by sexual intercourse, those who adopted, and those who conceived by donor insemination) and married women who conceived by sexual intercourse. The pathway to motherhood influenced the single women's premotherhood thinking about the role of a father in their child's life in that the sexual-intercourse mothers were less likely than either of the other two groups to mention that a father's absence is hard on a child or to mention that most kids end up without fathers anyway. The only group that reported any significant distress was a subgroup of sexual-intercourse single mothers whose pregnancies were unplanned. These findings suggest that single motherhood per se is not associated with difficulties but that the adjustment to motherhood is influenced by whether the choice to become a single parent occurs before or after conception.