Abortion, miscarriage may adversely affect later deliveries

A single abortion or miscarriage has the potential to impact subsequent pregnancies in a woman's life, a new study has warned. It has been well established that women who have had several abortions or miscarriages are likely to face a slightly higher risk of complications in subsequent pregnancies.

They may experience vaginal bleeding during early pregnancy, preterm birth, low fetal birth weight, and placenta-related complications. And now the new study suggests that even one pregnancy loss may have repercussions for subsequent pregnancies in a woman's life.

Women who have experienced a single pregnancy loss are about 30 per cent more likely to suffer complications in subsequent pregnancies than women who have never miscarried or had a single abortion, the findings showed.

"Our findings should be taken into account together with other parameters when assessing the risk for adverse outcome," said one of the lead researchers Liran Hiersch from Tel Aviv University in Israel.

"Doctors should know there is another element to factor in when assisting a woman before labor," Hiersch noted. The researchers reached at the conclusion after an analysis of 15,000 deliveries at a hospital in Israel over the last five years.

They compared the pregnancy outcomes of women who experienced a single previous first-trimester interruption with those women in their first pregnancies who had neither prior deliveries nor abortions. The findings appeared in the Journal of Maternal-Fetal and Neonatal Medicine.