Suicide in Pregnancy is much rarer now ‘thanks to legal abortion’

Published: Wednesday, April 03, 2013

Following last month's seminar on Abortion - The Lives and Health of Women in cooperation with Doctors for Choice, we published an article by one of the speakers Peadar O'Grady, Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist on Suicide in Pregnancy on our website.

Suicide in Pregnancy is much rarer now 'thanks to legal abortion'

It is important in discussing the relevance of suicide in the current abortion debate that good medical practice does not come second place to legal arrangements for certification. Maternal mental health matters because of the effects on the mother of mental distress, self-harm and the catastrophe of a completed suicide, but also because of the devastating effects any and all of these can have on any children involved. It is often observed that during pregnancy the incidence of mental health problems and suicidal ideas is high but the risk of completed suicide is lower than usual for comparable women. Even so, because the total of maternal deaths in pregnancy is low, suicide is still one of the top 4 causes of maternal deaths in developed countries.

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