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Abortions increase the risk of low birth weight in future pregnancies by a factor of three, and of premature birth by a factor of two, according to the largest U.S. study of its kind. The study is hardly perfect; the data is more than 40 years old and doesn't distinguish between medical abortions and "spontaneous abortions," better known as miscarriages. Yet the report, published today in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health (JECH), shows one of the strongest links yet between miscarriage or abortion on premature birth and low birth weight - major risk factors for infant death...
What makes report significant is the size and detail of data. Some previous, smaller studies on abortion and future birth weight have suffered because researchers were unable to untangle the effects of abortion from, say, the effects of being poor (which also happens to increase a woman's odds of having an abortion). But the researchers behind the JECH study, which evaluated just over 45,000 single-child live births from 1959 to 1966, were able to adjust for an impressive array of confounding variables, including race, age, weight, height, marital status, occupation, the number of prenatal visits, the number...
That kind of rigor makes the new findings particularly important. The study not only found a link between abortion or miscarriage and low birth weight, but it also found that the risk appears to increase with every subsequent miscarriage or abortion. The accruing risk, says co-author Tilahun Adera at Virginia Commonwealth University, suggests that termination of pregnancy is a true cause of low birth weight and preterm birth rather than a variable associated with such conditions. "It's not just an association," he says. "The risk of premature birth increases with the increasing number of abortions...
...average lifespan of a chimpanzee is 15 years, and only seven percent live past the age of 40, according to the study. But of the 34 wild chimpanzees featured in the study that were older than 40, researchers found that almost half were able to give birth into old age, with one giving birth...
...case concerns a Florida statute that went into effect on Jan. 1, 2006, which requires election officials to match information provided on voter registration applications - such as name, address, date of birth, Social Security number, and driver's license number - against data in official records before an individual can be registered to vote. The problem is that even a simple error such as a typo can keep a legitimate voter off the registration rolls. Compounding that issue is the state's large number of citizens with Haitian or Hispanic names that are either hyphenated or use multiple surnames. Opponents...