Abortion Raises Risk of Miscarriage of Subsequent Pregnancy 60 Percent
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by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
December 5, 2006
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — A team of British doctors has released the results of a new study showing that women who have an abortion run a higher risk of having a miscarriage in a subsequent pregnancy. The study also showed that women using in-vitro fertilization have higher miscarriage risks as well.
The doctors, affiliated with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said the reasons behind the increased miscarriage risk were vague.
However, they confirmed that women who had had a previous abortion experienced a 60 percent higher risk of having a miscarriage in another pregnancy.
Women using the in-vitro technique had a 40 percent greater risk of suffering a miscarriage.
In the study, Dr. Noreen Maconochie examined data from 603 women between the ages of 18 and 55 who had experienced a miscarriage during the first 13 weeks of their pregnancy. They compared those results with 6,116 women whose pregnancies advanced beyond 13 weeks.
The team published their findings in the British Journal of Gynegology.
This isn’t the first study to show that abortions adversely affect a woman’s fertility as other research shows that abortion can lead to infertility by increasing the risk of miscarriages.
A 1986 report in the medical journal Epidemiology reveals women with a history of abortion have a greater risk of fetal loss than women who had no previous abortions. Women with two prior pregnancies carried to term and no abortions had the lowest risk, while women with two prior abortions had the highest risk.
Meanwhile, a 1991 British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology article revealed that women with a history of abortion had a 1.5-1.7 times higher risk of ectopic pregnancy than women who had previously carried a pregnancy to term.
