Nora Sullivan of the Lozier Institute is reporting on the study conducted by Dr. David Reardon of the Elliot Institute and Dr. Priscilla Coleman of Bowling Green State University examined the full reproductive histories of all women born in Denmark between the years of 1962 and 1991. They found that compared to women who delivered their babies, women who had an early- or late-term abortion had significantly higher mortality rates within one to ten years of the event.
Abortion advocates have long asserted that abortion is safer than childbirth because the chance of complications is so much higher during the long gestational period and birth. However, these studies looked only at mortality rates in a limited time range without taking into account the woman's entire reproductive history.
Instead, Reardon and Coleman constructed pregnancy histories by linking Denmark's National Hospital Register for information on miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies and other losses; the Fertility Database for births and stillbirths; the National Board of Health Abortion Registry for abortions; the Cause of Death Register; and day-of-death records from the Central Person Register. What they found was that death rates associated with birth were actually lower than those associated with early- and late-term abortion and miscarriage in every year over a 10 year period.
"The data demonstrates that an abortion prior to 12 weeks is associated with 80 percent higher risk of death within the first year after the procedure and a 40 percent higher risk of death over 10 years," Sullivan reports.
The new study offers several possible interpretations of the data such as that women who are unhealthy are more likely to have a spontaneous or induced abortion. It is also possible that carrying a pregnancy to term has health benefits which reduce the risk of death. Another theory is that the loss of a baby may contribute to physiological or psychological effects which increase the risk of death.
The physiological and psychological complications associated with abortion are numerous and very well documented, and include risks such as uterine perforation, cervical lacerations, pelvic inflammatory disease, endometritis, and death. Abortion also puts a woman at risk for pre-term delivery, ectopic pregnancy and placenta previa in future pregnancies.
"In light of these findings (and the recent tragic case of 29-year-old Jennifer McKenna Morbelli, who died as a result of an abortion performed on her 33-week-old unborn daughter), it certainly seems advisable that women considering abortion be in full possession of all the facts before they make a choice which could result in consequences far more dire than those they had anticipated," Sullivan writes.
"Improved abortion reporting laws in the United States with record linkages to allow studies similar to this new analysis of Denmark’s data are also urgently needed."
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