Abortion pill does not spoil later pregnancies

Aug 16 2007

According to the latest research the abortion pill poses no apparent risk to a woman who later decides to have a child.

A study conducted on almost 12,000 women in Denmark who had previously had a surgical abortion, usually through vacuum aspiration, or had taken a drug regimens to eliminate the fetus, reached this conclusion.

The researchers from the National Institutes of Health found that there was no difference in the rates of subsequent tubal pregnancies, miscarriages, premature births or low birthweight births for women.

The research team from Denmark and the U.S. found that about 2.4 percent of later conceptions led to tubal pregnancy and just over 12 percent miscarried, regardless of the type of earlier abortion.

They found the chance of having a premature birth was 5.4 percent and a low birthweight baby was 4 percent, both slightly lower among the women who had received the abortion pill but the researchers say the difference was not statistically significant.

Dr. Jun Zhang who worked on the study says though the short-term safety of medical abortion has been well established, the new study is to date the most comprehensive look at the long-term impact of abortion pills.

The researchers examined data on all women living in Denmark who had undergone an abortion for non-medical reasons between 1999 and their subsequent pregnancies from national registries.

Using drugs to abort a pregnancy has become increasingly common in the U.S. since the approval of the drug known as RU-486 and from 2000 to 2004, 360,000 women used the abortion drug combination of mifepristone and misoprostol to end unwanted pregnancies.

The study did not compare complication rates between abortion pill users and women who had never had an abortion and the researchers say women who have never had an abortion tend to have a different pattern of income, smoking rates and other health-related behaviors that would make a comparison difficult.

The researchers say that other studies have found that surgical abortion in the first trimester does not increase the risk of ectopic pregnancy, spontaneous abortion, preterm birth, or low birth weight in subsequent pregnancies.

The abortion pill fails in one out of every fourteen cases, and a surgical abortion is then necessary.

Experts believe medical abortions appeal to women because they can be done in the privacy of the home, are less intrusive and intimidating than a surgical abortion and the pills can be prescribed by the family doctor.

Surgical abortions completely remove an embryo or fetus and surrounding uterine tissue, whereas medical abortions may leave remnants of placenta or other embryonic material; some experts queried whether this might interfere with subsequent pregnancies.

According to federal statistics the number of reported abortions in the U.S. have been declining since the early 1990s, although there was a slight increase in 2002.

The CDC says there is about one abortion for every four live births each year in the U.S.