Anorexia and abortion

Women with anorexia are more likely to have unplanned pregnancies and abortions. Researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and from Norway, studied 62,060 women as part of the Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort Study. They found that 50% of the women with anorexia reported having an unplanned pregnancy, compared to 18.9% of the women without the eating disorder; for abortions the figures were 24.2% and 14.6% respectively. The researchers thought the difference could be due to the fact that the women with anorexia thought that their condition had rendered them - at least temporarily - infertile.