A social-psychiatric comparison of 399 women requesting abortion and 118 pregnant women intending to deliver.

Abstract

The social and economic problems revealed in a study of the social-psychiatric background of a group of Swedish women requesting abortion compared with those of a control group of pregnant women carrying the children to term indicates that social problems are associated with the desire to abort. The rise in the number of abortions due to relaxation of abortion laws prompted this investigation. 105 women applicants for legal abortion during January 1971 were interviewed and 294 women were studied retrospectively through clinic and hospital records. The control group of 118 pregnant women were asked to answer an interview schedule which was almost identical with the one used in the abortion group. The two groups differed markedly in several respects: the abortion cases were relatively younger or older; they had a poorer socioeconomic status; they had a more frequent history of broken homes and alcoholism in their families during childhood; their subjective opinions of their conditions of upbringing were less positive than those of the mothers-to-be; they were pregnant more often as the result of sporadic or broken relationships and they had less contraception experience than did the controls. The difference in the age of sexual debut might differentiate between some important groups among abortion applicants. The young girls who apply for abortion start their sex lives earlier and they probably constitute a group to women with unfavorable backgrounds which force them into premature and unstable sexual contacts. In the age group 20-30 there is a group of women who had their sexual debut later than the controls and these might be women with poor identification with the female role and are not interested in becoming mothers. Because there are many more social and economic problems in the abortion group than in the control group induced abortion must be regarded mainly as a social problem.