Abortion pill poses no risk for later pregnancy

By Gene Emery

BOSTON (Reuters) - Abortion pills pose no apparent risk to a woman who later decides to have a child, according to a study of nearly 12,000 women in Denmark who had a chemical or surgical abortion.

The study in the New England Journal of Medicine found no difference in the rates of subsequent tubal pregnancies, miscarriages, premature births or low birthweight births for women who had previously had surgical abortion, usually through vacuum aspiration, or those taking any of the three drug regimens that eliminate a fetus.

About 2.4 percent of later conceptions led to tubal pregnancy and just over 12 percent miscarried, regardless of the type of earlier abortion, the researchers found.

The likelihood of having a premature birth (5.4 percent) or a low birthweight baby (4 percent) was slightly lower among the women who had received the abortion pill but the difference was not statistically significant.

"The short-term safety of medical abortion has been well established," said Dr. Jun Zhang of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, who worked on the study.

Zhang said the new study is the most comprehensive look to date of the long-term impact of abortion pills.

"We identified all women living in Denmark who had undergone an abortion for non-medical reasons between 1999 and 2004 and obtained information regarding subsequent pregnancies from national registries," his team wrote.

The team only looked at the first pregnancy after the abortion. "We didn't have the data to look at second and third pregnancies," Zhang said.