THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Abortion 'increases risk of premature birth'

Abortion 'increases risk of premature birth'

This is an unusual study in that it DID control for social class. It also replicates many previous findings. As abortion fills me with horror, I am certainly inclined to accept its conclusions. Scientific honesty impels me to note the weaknesses of the study, however.

Failure to control for both smoking and IQ are large lacunae. Smokers are known to be more sexually promiscuous and greater risk takers generally. So were the smokers in the sample more likely to have abortions? Almost certainly. And smokers are also more likely to have lower birthweight babies. So it could be that we are simply seeing the effects of smoking here, not the effects of abortion.

Similarly, high IQ people are both healthier and most likely better at avoiding unwanted pregnancies. So we could be seeing an IQ effect here too

Abortion appears to increase the chance of giving birth prematurely in a subsequent wanted pregnancy by a third, according to a British study.

Having a surgical abortion could increase the risk of giving birth before 37 weeks by even more than that, found academics at Aberdeen University.

Prof Siladitya Bhattacharya, a gynaecologist, and a team made their conclusions after comparing the second pregnancies of 170,000 women who had previously had an abortion, to 458,000 undergoing their first pregnancies. They found those who had experienced abortions were 33 per cent more likely to subsequently deliver pre-term than those who had never had an abortion.

They were also 44 per cent more likel to give birth extremely prematurely – before 34 weeks.

The academics controlled for social factors like class – known to be have an effect on pre-term delivery – but were unable to take into account smoking because of a lack of information.

The study was presented on Monday at the annual conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) in Stockholm, Sweden.

Prof Bhattacharya’s wife, Dr Sohinee Bhattacharya, an epidemiologist, who gave the presentation, said the physical act of surgical abortions in particular could damage the cervix.

She explained: “When you do a dilatation of the cervix, quite heavy, thick instruments are used. “Especially in younger women, under 25, it is particularly shown to have an effect because the cervix is quite tight.”

Their study showed that women who underwent surgical abortion were 27 per cent more likely to give birth prematurely in their next pregnancy than those who'd had a medical abortion. The team has not yet analysed the overall increased risk of pre-term birth for each type of abortion, compared to women who have not had an abortion.

Prof Bhattacharya noted that women who had undergone an abortion were only as likely to deliver prematurely as those who had previously miscarried. But he said every effort was needed to understand all the factors that led to premature deliveries. “It is important because pre-term birth is a major cause of death - and short and long-term disability - in babies.

“It also causes the NHS millions in terms of neo-natal care and millions more in terms of support for those with continuing disabilities.”

SOURCE

2 comments:

UnknownJuly 10, 2011 at 4:19 AM
Your conclusions (presented at the top of the article) do not seem to have any relation to the rest of the article.

You state that "Smokers are known to be more sexually promiscuous and greater risk takers generally" - can you provide a reference that substantiates that statement? You state a conclusion - "So were the smokers in the sample more likely to have abortions? Almost certainly" - some proof of these conclusion would be appreciated.

Another statement you make is that "Similarly, high IQ people are both healthier and most likely better at avoiding unwanted pregnancies. So we could be seeing an IQ effect here too". In my personal experience those with a higher IQ are more interested in the potential rather than the physical now so your assertion that those with higher IQ are healthier seems to contradict the general perception.

As for the statement that (as you put it) "high IQ people are both healthier and most likely better at avoiding unwanted pregnancies" I would respond with that those with a basic sex education would be smart enough to use some sort of birth control (regardless of it is the pill, condoms or a hormone injection) to avoid unwanted pregnancy. A high IQ is not required to decide that this is beneficial - it simply comes down to availability, cost and social stigma.

If you really want to reduce the number of abortions then educate people how to have sex without impregnation - teach boys to use condoms, teach girls to go on the pill or use alternative measures to avoid unwanted pregnancies.
ReplyDelete
Replies
JRJuly 10, 2011 at 2:54 PM
The findings about smokers go back to Eysenck in the '70s

The findings about high IQ people go back to Terman & Oden in the 1920s

Google it

"those with a basic sex education would be smart enough.. "

So how come many don't?
ReplyDelete
Replies

Add comment

All comments containing Chinese characters will not be published as I do not understand them

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights