Legal abortion for mental health indications

Abstract

Where legal systems allow therapeutic abortion to preserve women's mental health, practitioners often lack access to mental health professionals for making critical diagnoses or prognoses that pregnancy or childcare endangers patients' mental health. Practitioners themselves must then make clinical assessments of the impact on their patients of continued pregnancy or childcare. The law requires only that practitioners make assessments in good faith, and by credible criteria. Mental disorder includes psychological distress or mental suffering due to unwanted pregnancy and responsibility for childcare, or, for instance, anticipated serious fetal impairment. Account should be taken of factors that make patients vulnerable to distress, such as personal or family mental health history, factors that may precipitate mental distress, such as loss of personal relationships, and factors that may maintain distress, such as poor education and marginal social status. Some characteristics of patients may operate as both precipitating and maintaining factors, such as poverty and lack of social support.

Women’s demand for late-term abortion: A social or psychiatric issue?

“…Possible psychosocial issues could influence decision making and delay of abortion. Providers should predict latter capability for motherhood in unfavorable life circumstances [10][11][12][13] .…”

Developments in Laws on Induced Abortion: 1998–2007

“…Depending on a woman's background and circumstances, distress over a pregnancy resulting from rape or incest, a diagnosis of a severe fetal impairment or a pregnancy occurring outside of marriage may all be deemed sufficient grounds for an abortion under these laws. 5 Socioeconomic factors are explicitly recognized as grounds for abortion by countries in the fourth category. Fourteen countries, in which more than 20% of the world's people live, have laws that permit a medical provider to take a woman's social and economic circumstances into account when determining her eligibility for an abortion.…”

Contre-indications médicales à la grossesse

“…Quant aux pathologies psychiatriques lourdes, les risques sont le devenir de l'enfant et le risque de suicide chez la femme [6]. La stabilisation et l'encadrement permettent dans certains cas d'envisager néanmoins une grossesse.…”