Women who receive abortions are twice as likely to suffer mental health episodes that require hospitalization compared to women who give birth, a new study has found.
The study, which compared 28,721 women who received abortions with 1,228,807 women who gave birth in Quebec, Canada between 2006 and 2022, found that “Abortion was strongly associated with mental health hospitalization within five years.” The hospitalizations included those admitted for psychiatric disorders, substance use disorders, and suicide attempts.
“While these findings are not evidence of a causal link between abortion and long-term mental health sequelae, they support the possibility that abortion may be a marker of an increased lifetime risk of mental disorders,” the study reads. “Screening for mental disorders at the time of abortion may be an opportunity to identify women who could benefit from psychological and social support, particularly women with preexisting mental health disorders, under age 25 years, and with previous live births or abortions.”
Women who aborted their babies were more than twice as likely to suffer a mental health episode that required hospitalization, with 104.0 per 10,000 women per year requiring mental health services compared to 42.0 in 10,000 women who did not abort, according to the study. Women under the age of 25 or those suffering from a preexisting mental health condition were especially at risk of mental health-related hospitalization following an abortion.
The first five years following an abortion had the strongest correlation to mental health episodes, but the “risks waned over time,” the study found. The risk for women who had abortions took about 17 years to begin “to resemble” that of women who gave birth.
Between 2006 and 2022, the number of women who had an abortion who were later hospitalized after an attempted suicide was 14.7 per 10,000, according to the study. About 56.7 per 10,000 women were hospitalized due to substance abuse disorders compared to 15 per 10,000 women who carried their babies to term. Overall psychiatric disorder hospitalizations for women who had abortions occurred in 85.1 per 10,000 women compared to 37.1 per 10,000 women who did not abort.
The study was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Quebec Health Research Fund.
The study also cited previous research that found “While patients with abortions were more likely to have a new psychiatric diagnosis after pregnancy than patients with deliveries, they were also more likely to have a psychiatric diagnosis before pregnancy.”
Women who already had children were at an increased risk of suffering a mental health episode that required hospitalization after an abortion compared to women receiving abortions who did not already have children, the study found.
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