Sexual minorities more likely to terminate pregnancies
People who self-identified as a sexual minority were nearly twice as likely to have a pregnancy that ended in abortion than their heterosexual peers—and thus may be disproportionately impacted by abortion restrictions, according to a study from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
The study was published May 6 in JAMA Network Open.
Researchers led by Payal Chakraborty, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, looked at more than 235,000 pregnancies in nurses, their offspring, and nursing students over a 65-year period. They found that, while all sexual minority subgroups were more likely than completely heterosexual individuals to have pregnancies ending in abortions, those with the highest abortion use were bisexual, lesbian, or gay.
In a May 14 Rewire News Group Q&A, Chakraborty discussed factors that may explain the study’s finding. People in sexual minority groups, she said, are more likely to experience discrimination in employment and housing; to experience poverty, and thus to have less access to health care and reproductive health care, including contraception; to experience sexual assault; and to have less access to sex education because curricula often don’t include LGBTQ+ information.
Chakraborty added that sexual minorities are more likely to be disproportionately impacted by growing abortion restrictions. “These restrictions are really likely to exacerbate, entrench, and compound the social and reproductive health inequities that sexual minority populations already face,” she said.
Other Harvard Chan co-authors of the study included Sarah McKetta, Colleen Reynolds, Kodiak Soled, Tabor Hoatson, Aimee Huang, Heather Eliassen, Sebastien Haneuse, and Brittany Charlton.
Read the Rewire News Group article: Queer People Nearly Twice as Likely To Terminate Pregnancy—New Study
