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.