Women face increased risk of depression, hospitalization for mental health after abortion: study

August 28, 2025

A recent study in the Journal of Psychiatric Research shows that women who have an abortion show “increased risk of mental health-related hospitalization” compared to women who carry their pregnancies to term.

The Christian Post reports that researchers with the University of Montreal Hospital Research Centre, University of Sherbrooke and McGill University, oversaw a retrospective cohort study of 28,721 induced abortions and approximately 1.22 million births at hospitals in Quebec, Canada, between 2006 and 2022.

The researchers followed up with the women after their pregnancies to identify mental health-related hospitalizations and to determine if there was a link between abortion and hospitalization.

The study, titled, “Induced abortion and implications for long-term mental health: a cohort study of 1.2 million pregnancies” found that “Rates of mental health-related hospitalization were higher following induced abortions than other pregnancies.”

According to the Christian Post, researchers also reported that “abortion is associated with an increased risk of mental health-related hospitalization in the long term, but the association weakens with time.”

David Reardon, director of the pro-life Elliot Institute, noted that researchers, “found that prior mental health problems clearly magnify the risk that abortion will exacerbate the risk of a psychiatric crisis, but there [was] also elevated risks for women with no prior mental health issues.”

Reardon added, “We now know that the majority of abortion patients say that their abortions did negatively impact their mental health. To insist that abortion never impacts mental health is, essentially … an absurd, ideologically driven fantasy.”

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