Terminating Unwanted First Pregnancy Doesn’t Add to Risk of Depression
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Women who terminate an unwanted first pregnancy are no more likely to develop depression than women who carry unwanted first pregnancies to term.
This finding emerged from a survey of 1,247 American women who had unwanted first pregnancies, reported Nancy Felipe Russo, Ph.D, a professor of psychology at Arizona State, and Sarah Schmiege, Ph.D., of the University of Colorado in Boulder.
Of the 1,247 who said they had unwanted first pregnancies, 768 delivered babies and 479 had abortions.
The results, which were published today in the BMJ Online First, contradicted results of a 2002 analysis of the same data by other authors, a study also published in BMJ. They reported a relationship between termination of unwanted first pregnancy and increased risk of depression.
Drs. Russo and Schmiege wrote that the inconsistencies between the two studies can be explained by differences in methodology of the two studies. They cited differences in coding of key variables and sample selection.
“Given that the numbers used in our study are based on coding language used by the staff of the survey, we believe they represent the most accurate variable definition,” they wrote. “The previous study’s exclusion of a major proportion of adolescent pregnancies is a fatal flaw for any study attempting to generalize findings to first unwanted pregnancies.”
In the current study, women who aborted an unwanted first pregnancy had “significantly higher mean education and income and lower total family size, all of which were associated with a lower risk of depression,” the investigators said.
By contrast, women who delivered unwanted pregnancies usually had less education, lower income and larger families - all factors that increase the risk of depression.
The study sample was selected from a U.S. national longitudinal study of 12,686 men and women ages 14 to 24 in 1979. The year of first pregnancy ranged from 1970 to 1992.
Additional analysis stratified the women into four groups: women who delivered before 1980 and those who delivered in 1980 or later and women who aborted before 1980 versus those who aborted unwanted first pregnancies after 1980.
“Women in the pre-1980 delivery group had a significantly higher risk of experiencing depression than women in the other three groups,” the authors wrote.
The authors listed a number of limitations to their study, including the fact that while the effect of unwanted first pregnancies was assessed it did not examine the effect of unwanted pregnancies that occurred in women who previously had a planned pregnancy.
The authors said there is a possibility that there was an underreporting of abortions, but that “does not account for the lack of a relation between abortion and depression.”
Source: BMJ Online First
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