The analysis of the reasons women give for why they had an abortion shows that the most commonly reported ones are postponing childbearing to a more suitable time or stopping altogether to focus energies and resources on existing children. The fact that these two reasons were less important in Latin America and the United States than in Asia and some of the other developed countries may partly be explained by the high prevalence of sterilization at relatively young ages in these first two regions, which reduces the need for abortion to limit family size. The desire to delay or stop childbearing probably reflects a number of underlying, more specific reasons for not wanting to have a child at that time.