Why do women choose to seek an abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy? A new study out of the University of California, School of Medicine in San Francisco has revealed some surprising answers to this question.
The results of that study revealed that women aged 20-24 were more likely than those aged 25-34 to have a later abortion, and women who discovered their pregnancy before eight weeks' gestation were less likely than others to do so. Later abortion recipients' experiences logistical delays, such as difficulty in find a provider or raising funds for the procedure and associated travel costs, all of which compounded delays in seeking an abortion. In fact, most women seeking later abortion fit into one of five profiles: 1) they are raising children alone; 2) they were depressed or using illicit substances; 3) they were in conflict with a male partner or experiencing domestic violence; 4) had trouble deciding for abortion then encountered access problems; or 5) were young and pregnant for the first time.
Fetal abnormalities were not among the five reasons why women abort late in the pregnancy. Neither was non-viability a factor in late term abortion choices. Women who have third trimester abortions do not generally do so for these reasons. Rather, they do so because they find themselves in one of the five situations listed above.
The surprise is that women who are aborting late term pregnancies are doing so because they are young and struggling and probably scared; they are not generally making that decision because the child is not healthy. This empirical perspective on reproductive health changes the narrative on late term abortion justification almost completely.
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