The effect of various factors on anxiety levels in women undergoing abortions

I. Gönenç, E.Z. Tuzcular Vural, G. Köse, N. Aka

Haydarpaca Numune Education and Research Hospital, Family Planning Unit, Istanbul, Turkey

Objectives Anxiety is defined as an unpleasant emotional and physical state of apprehension. Abortion is a stressful event and women are said to experience subsequent problems regarding anxiety. In our study we aimed to show the relation between the anxiety levels before abortion procedures and certain sociodemographic features and reproductive histories of women seeking medical help for termination of unintended pregnancies.

Design and methods The material of our study consisted of 356 women, with unintended pregnancies of 5 to 8 weeks gestational age, asking for legal abortions. All women were interviewed before the procedure using the Hospital Anxiety and Depresion Scale (HADS) and were given 600 mg Ibuprofen, PO before the procedure. None of the women had received any kind of anxiolytic drug. The statistical evaluations were made using the SPSS for Windows programme version 10.1. Descriptive tests such as mean and standard deviations and correlation tests were used to show the relation between reproductive history and the amount of anxiety perceived.

Results The mean age of the women was 32.37 ±  4.38 years. The mean gestational age was 7.03 weeks ± 0.8 days. The mean of prior deliveries, pregnancies, miscarriages, abortions and living children were 2.19 ± 1.33, 4.04 ± 2.28, 0.36 ± 0.15, 0.70 ± 0.36 and 2.06 ± 1.30 respectively. Of these women, 17.98 % were primigravids, 85.12 % had legal, civil marriages while 6.74 % had religious marriages; 9.83 % did not have social security. The relationship between age, social security, educational status, years since last delivery, number of deliveries, number of pregnancies, number of abortions, number of miscarriages were as follows: age-anxiety; r = 0.081, social security-anxiety; r = 0.125, educational status- anxiety: r = -0.346, years since last delivery- anxiety; r = 0. 107, number of deliveries- anxiety; r = 0.156, number of pregnancies- anxiety; r = 0.135, number of abortions- anxiety; r = - 0.104, number of miscarriages- anxiety; r = - 0.213. 

Conclusions Our study showed that the age, social security status, reproductive history and marital status had weak and negligible correlations with anxiety levels of the women undergoing termination of pregnancy.