Unwed pregnant teens and 20-somethings who attend or have graduated from private religious schools are more likely to end their pregnancies than peers from public schools, according to research in the June issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.

The research looked into how personal religious involvement, schoolmate religious involvement and school type influenced the pregnancy decisions of 1,504 unmarried and never-divorced women age 26 and younger from 125 different schools.

The study found that conservative Protestants-identified as including "evangelicals and fundamentalist Christians"-were the least likely to report having an abortion, less likely than mainline Protestants, Catholics and women with non-Christian religious affiliations. Women who attended school with conservative Protestants were more likely to decide to have an extramarital baby in their 20s than in their teenage years.

"The values of conservative Protestant classmates seem to have an abortion limiting effect on women in their 20s, but not in their teens, presumably because the educational and economic costs of motherhood are reduced as young women grow older," said the report's author, Amy Adamczyk.

"This research suggests that young, unmarried women are confronted with a number of social, financial and health-related factors that can make it difficult for them to act according to religious values when deciding whether to keep or abort a pregnancy," said the study's author, sociologist Amy Adamczyk of John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

"Religious school attendance is not necessarily indicative of conservative religious beliefs because students attend these schools for a variety of reasons," Adamczyk said. "These schools tend to generate high levels of commitment and strong social ties among their students and families, so abortion rates could be higher due to the potential for increased feelings of shame related to an extramarital birth."

Source: MSNBC