Abortion and mental health disorders: evidence from a 30-year longitudinal study.

Results from the well-known Christchurch Health and Development Study (CHDS) show that, among a population of over 800 women, those women who had had abortions suffered from 30% more mental health problems than their equivalents who had never undergone an abortion.

This paper comes from the well-known CHDS in New Zealand. The CHDS is a longitudinal study of a birth cohort of 1265 children born in the Christchurch urban region in New Zealand who were studied at birth, 4 months, 1 year and at annual intervals to age 16 years, and again at ages 18, 21, 25 and 30. The analysis in this paper concerns the cohort of 534 women for whom information on pregnancy history and mental health outcomes were available, representing between 80% and 83% of the original cohort of 630 women. Data were gathered on the pregnancy and mental health histories of this group studied to the age of 30. After adjustment for confounding, abortion was associated with a small increase in the risk for mental disorders. Those women who had had abortions had rates of mental disorder that were about 30% higher than those who did not. There were no consistent associations between other pregnancy outcomes and mental health. Estimates of attributable risk indicated that exposure to abortion accounted for 1.5% to 5.5% of the overall rate of mental disorders. The authors concluded that this evidence is consistent with the view that abortion may be associated with a small increase in risk for mental disorders. Although other pregnancy outcomes were not related to increased risk of mental health problems in this study, there is other evidence that pregnancy loss is also associated with psychiatric morbidity {1}.

References: {1} Dingle et al. Br J Psychiatry 2008, 193:455-60 [PMID:19043146].