A new study found that adolescent mothers in Wales and England seeking for abortion are likely to have had a previous pregnancy. This research findings now flags the possibility that abortion is being used as a means of contraception.
The researchers wanted to utilize national records that document the abortion rates in England and Wales so that they can intricately identify the proportions of women aged 20 years old and below who have had single or multiple pregnancies, whether successfully delivered or aborted, in the past.
The researchers from the University of East Anglia (UEA) conducted the investigation by first obtaining abortion information of women in the said age group from the Office of National Statistic and the Department of Health between 1992-2013. They then analyzed the data and were able to come up with significant results.
The findings of the study, published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, showed that 20 years worth of data imply that 33 percent of teenage women chose to have an abortion after a previous pregnancy. The highest rate of this event occurred before 2004 and has now remained in a steady state. By 2013, the rate of young mothers who opted to undergo an abortion after previously becoming pregnant plummeted to 22.9 percent. Young women who have had multiple pregnancies before opting to have an abortion were only 5 percent.
Adolescent mothers may have a high risk of having further, unplanned or mistimed pregnancies, said Lisa McDaid, the study lead author from the UEA's Norwich Medical School. All groups must come together and work towards providing teenage mothers an efficient contraceptive plan that may serve their needs after pregnancy. They must also be given adequate support to continuously employ these planned interventions and have better access to emergency contraception, she added.
In the end, the researchers concluded that approximately one in four adolescent mothers going to abortion clinics have had at least one pregnancy, which led to either birth or abortion. The authors recommended better regulations to more correctly determine the proportion of teenage mothers seeking for abortion as a result of a subsequent pregnancy.
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