Understanding the relationship between childbearing and socioeconomic status could help explain one mechanism by which the United States' gender disparity in poverty comes to exist. However, measuring the relationship between childbearing and socioeconomic status is complicated by the very high prevalence of childbearing among women and multiple sources of endogeneity in the characteristics of childbearing that do vary. Focusing on the timing of childbearing, I use miscarriage to construct an instrument for delivery and build a counterfactual condition for having a short temporal space between births. Using this approach with data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, I estimate the effect on midlife poverty of having first and second births within 24 months of each other. My results indicate that these short interbirth intervals are causally related to increased midlife poverty. The results are robust to a variety of alternate specifications of counterfactual conditions and estimation methods.

This dissertation uses digital records of a massive online conversation among opponents of an abortion restriction bill in Texas during summer 2013. It describes the geography of the participants, investigates the role of emotions and social ties in shaping engagement, and describes a radical change in the way movement participants talked about their aims. Theoretically, it approaches the investigation of abortion rights organizing from the perspective of both social movement studies and the sociological and demographic study of reproductive health. Methodologically, it employs a hybrid of computational and qualitative techniques to analyze a very large dataset.

Alcohol use among mothers has received little academic attention. This is particularly concerning given evidence of increased alcohol use among women, along with the recent portrayal of alcohol use as a suitable method for coping with the stressors of parenthood. Role Theory, Stress Theory, and the Opportunity Perspective provide a theoretical framework to suggest that the transition to motherhood and the stressors associated with managing child behavior problems could influence a mother's level of alcohol consumption. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of child externalizing behavior, child emotionality, and maternal sense of competence on mothers' drinking across years 1-5 postpartum. This study is a secondary data analysis of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study and utilized a series of linear and logistic regressions. Despite an initial correlation between child externalizing behavior and maternal alcohol use, there was not significant evidence to support the hypotheses of this study. Child externalizing behavior did not significantly predict the largest number of drinks mothers consumed or the frequency at which they engaged in binge drinking. There was not significant evidence to suggest that parental sense of competence moderated the hypothesized relationship between child externalizing behavior and maternal alcohol use, nor was there evidence that emotionality significantly mediated this relationship. A discussion of limitations, implications, and future directions for research, prevention, and intervention is included.