Study: Mental health-related hospitalizations rates doubled for women who had abortions

CNA Staff, Sep 1, 2025 / 07:00 am (CNA).

A recent study found that the rate of mental-health-related hospitalizations doubled for women who had abortions compared with women who gave birth.

The study, published this summer in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, compared abortions with other pregnancies in hospitals in Quebec, Canada, between 2006 and 2022, tracking data on women for up to 17 years.

The study, which compared more than 1.2 million women who gave birth in Quebec hospitals with more than 28,000 women who had abortions, found that “rates of mental-health-related hospitalization were higher following induced abortions than other pregnancies.”

Abortion was associated with a number of mental-health-related difficulties including hospitalization for psychiatric disorders, substance use disorders, and suicide attempts, the study found.

This association was especially high for women who were younger than 25 years at the time of their abortions, as well as for patients who already had an existing mental illness.

The risk of mental health hospitalization was highest within five years of the abortion. The risk decreased gradually after the five-year point, but only after 17 years did the risk begin “to resemble” pregnancies carried to term, according to the study.

Tessa Cox, senior research associate at the think tank Charlotte Lozier Institute, said the study was “particularly powerful.”

“This recent study out of Canada, which has more comprehensive health care data than the U.S., adds to a mounting body of research suggesting that abortion can harm women’s mental health,” Cox said.

“The abortion industry downplays the evidence, so the fact that this new study included more than a million women and took prior mental health and other related factors into account makes it particularly powerful,” she told CNA.

“Women deserve to have all the facts — and women and men who have been harmed by abortion need to know that forgiveness and healing are possible,” Cox said.

Another scholar called the study “robust,” noting that it followed the data over an extended period of time and had constants that enabled the information to be more accurate.

Michael New, senior associate scholar at the Charlotte Lozier Institute and assistant professor of practice at The Catholic University of America, noted that the study “provides strong statistical evidence that abortion increases the risk of a range of mental health problems.”

New said the study had many strengths, including its large sample size, the way it tracked women over an extended period of time, and how the authors analyzed data from an extended period of time.

This method was rare, according to the study, which noted that “large population-based studies with long-term follow-up are rare yet necessary to understand the mental health needs of women post abortion.”

New called this study’s results “robust,” noting that this study stands firm against criticism that similar studies have faced.

The study is one of several that have investigated correlation between mental health challenges and abortion.

“While other research has found that women who obtain abortions are likely to suffer from mental health disorders, critics of these studies have argued that women with mental health problems are more likely to obtain abortions in the first place,” New said.

“Most importantly it holds constant whether or not the women in the study had been hospitalized with mental health problems in the past,” he said of the Canadian study.