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Abortion
Doesn't Raise Depression Risk
Among women with an unwanted pregnancy, those who carry
the pregnancy to term are more likely to experience later
depression than those who terminate the pregnancy with
an abortion, new study findings suggest.
Well-designed studies have generally shown that abortion
does not contribute to an increased risk of depression,
Dr. Sarah Schmiege and Dr. Nancy Felipe Russo note in
their report in a recently published BMJ Online First.
However, one previous study examining these associations
among women with an unwanted first pregnancy found that
induced abortion was associated with a higher risk of
depression than a pregnancy carried to term.
But Schmiege, from the University of Colorado in Boulder,
and Russo, from Arizona State University in Tempe, believe
this analysis was flawed.
For their study, they identified a large group of women
ages 14 to 21 in 1979 who had an unwanted pregnancy between
1970 and 1992 and for whom personal and outcome data were
available. The women were interviewed over several years
to examine the relation between pregnancy outcome and
later depression.
The authors found that terminating compared to delivering
an unwanted first pregnancy was not directly related to
risk of depression. Instead, women who delivered before
1980 had a much higher risk of depression than all other
groups.
These findings "directly contradict the claim that terminating
an unwanted first pregnancy puts women at higher risk
of subsequent depression, particularly for younger women,"
Schmiege and Russo contend.
Their analysis also showed that women who had aborted
a pregnancy had significantly higher mean education attainment
and income and lower total family size. These factors
could explain the higher risk of depression among women
who don't abort an unwanted pregnancy.
"This suggests that if the goal is to reduce women's
risk for depression, research should focus on how to prevent
and ameliorate the effect of unwanted childbearing, particularly
for younger women," the authors conclude.
