“‘Wantedness’ was originally a term coined to describe a mother’s attitude toward the birth of a child.
“Sociologists decided that the degree to which a birth was wanted could be measured by accounting for less than perfect timing, less than perfect finances, or simply emotional hesitancy on the part of the mother.
“Yet its wider applications had more to do with phenomenology than with science.
“It could describe a person’s value in the social economy and the environmental factors limiting that value.”
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