According to a study published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, as summarized by Reuters:
Women who have an abortion in the second trimester of pregnancy are more likely than women who terminate their pregnancies earlier to have repeat abortions, new research shows.
And women who initially have a late abortion are also substantially more likely to have a second late abortion, Dr. Oskari Heikinheimo of Helsinki University Hospital in Finland and colleagues found. They also found that being younger than 20 sharply increased a woman’s risk of having repeat abortions, and of having repeat late abortions.
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Late termination of pregnancy — meaning abortion at 13 weeks gestation or later — represents 5 to 10 percent of all abortions, the researchers note, while from 30 to 47 percent of women who have an abortion will have another later on.
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Heikinheimo and colleagues looked at 41,750 Finnish women who had an abortion between 2000 and 2005 — 1,900 of whom terminated their pregnancies in the second trimester.
Compared with women who had first trimester abortions, those who had second-trimester abortions were 40 percent more likely to have had a second abortion by the end of 2006, the researchers found, while they were nearly four times as likely to have a second late abortion, and five times as likely to have an abortion after 16 weeks’ gestation.
And women younger than 20 years old were seven times as likely as older women to have repeat abortions, and more than 12 times as likely to have a second abortion during their second trimester of pregnancy.
I would be most appreciative to anyone who could provide me a PDF of the AJOG article, which requires a subscription.
