Death Rate Following Abortion Much Higher Than Previously Known ABORTION ASSOCIATED WITH HEIGHTENED MORTALITY RATE, STUDY REVEALS.(Brief Article)

In the discussion of abortion, one of the "facts" that carries the most weight with most people is the notion that abortion, by comparison, is safer for the mother than childbirth. However, solid research is beginning to accumulate that undermines this conventional wisdom.

The latest research to examine the issue of death rates associated with pregnancy outcome was published in the August issue of the Southern Medical Journal. By carefully reviewing publicly accessible documents, the authors found that women who have abortions are at significantly higher risk of death than women who give birth.

"Deaths Associated With Pregnancy Outcome: A Record Linkage Study of Low Income Women," showed not only that there is a greater short-term risk of death for aborting women but long-term risk as well. Authors David C. Reardon, Philip G. Ney, Fritz Scheuren, Jesse Cougle, Priscilla K. Coleman, and Thomas W. Strahan found that in the first two years following their abortions women were nearly twice as likely to die as women who carried their children to term. This elevated mortality risk persisted for the entire eight years the study examined.

The study was designed with a similar approach as used in a Finnish study published in 1997. The national study in Finland showed significantly higher death rates associated with abortion than with childbirth.

The Finnish study used a method called record-linkage, which allowed the researchers to match cases of women with various pregnancy outcomes to subsequent death events. This has the advantage that the study does not rely on getting an accurate report from the women, but, instead, uses objective statistics from government files. This is particularly useful in Finland, where detailed health records are kept on everyone by the central government.

The objective of the American study was to use the same approach to examine this association using an American population over a longer period. In order to obtain a similar set of statistics, the authors turned to California Medicaid records for 1989. The 173,279 women who had an induced abortion or a delivery in 1989 were then linked to death certificates for the period 1989 to 1997.

The authors' examination revealed that over that eight-year period studied, the women who aborted, compared to those giving birth, had a 154 percent higher risk of death from suicide, an 82 percent higher risk of death from accidents, and a 44 percent higher risk of death from natural causes. This confirmed the trends found in the Finnish study published in 1997. That government-funded study of maternal deaths revealed that in the first year following an abortion, aborting women were 252 percent more likely to die compared to women who delivered and 76 percent more likely to die compared to women who had not been pregnant.