New research out of Europe suggests further evidence that abortions cause an increased risk of premature birth in future pregnancies, National Right to Life News reports.
Dr. Pim Ankum from the University of Amsterdam’s Academic Medical Centre examined data from nearly 2 million women across 21 cohort studies, and concluded that dilation and curretage (D&C) procedures, whether to abort a living fetus or remove a miscarried one, increase a woman’s odds of giving birth before 37 weeks by 29% and before 32 weeks by 69%. The odds are higher still for women with multiple past D&Cs.
According to Ankum, these findings hold even with control groups of similar women without D&C histories factored in. He suggests two possible causes: dilation causing damage to the cervix that makes it open too early, and impairment of the cervix’s defenses against ascending genital tract infections, which Mayo Clinic identifies as a risk factor for preterm birth.
Abortion’s defenders often dispute the link between abortion and medical problems such as premature birth, but National Right to Life Education & Research Director Dr. Randall O’Bannon points to “over a hundred peer-reviewed studies involving mothers and newborns from 34 countries stretching back from the present to 1972.” As Live Action News has previously relayed, multiple studies have concurred in recent years.
In 2007, for example, TIME Magazine reported that the then-“largest U.S. study of its kind” found “[w]omen who had had one, two or three prior abortions or miscarriages were three, five and nine times more likely, respectively, to have a low-birth-weight child.”
