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Abortion is the termination of a pregnancy by removal or expulsion of an embryo or fetus. An abortion that occurs without intervention is known as a miscarriage or "spontaneous abortion"; these occur in approximately 30% to 40% of all pregnancies. When deliberate steps are taken to end a pregnancy, it is called an induced abortion, or less frequently "induced miscarriage". The unmodified word abortion generally refers to an induced abortion. The most common reason women give for having an abortion is for birth-timing and limiting family size. Other reasons reported include maternal health, an inability to afford a child, domestic violence, lack of support, feeling they are too young, wishing to complete education or advance a career, and not being able or willing to raise a child conceived as a result of rape or incest.
Ectopic pregnancy is a complication of pregnancy in which the embryo attaches outside the uterus. Signs and symptoms classically include abdominal pain and vaginal bleeding, but fewer than 50 percent of affected women have both of these symptoms. The pain may be described as sharp, dull, or crampy. Pain may also spread to the shoulder if bleeding into the abdomen has occurred. Severe bleeding may result in a fast heart rate, fainting, or shock. With very rare exceptions, the fetus is unable to survive.
Miscarriage, also known in medical terms as a spontaneous abortion, is the death and expulsion of an embryo or fetus before it can survive independently. The term miscarriage is sometimes used to refer to all forms of pregnancy loss and pregnancy with abortive outcomes before 20 weeks of gestation.
In human reproduction, a live birth occurs when a fetus exits the mother showing any definite sign of life such as voluntary movement, heartbeat, or pulsation of the umbilical cord, for however brief a time and regardless of whether the umbilical cord or placenta are intact. After the fetus is expelled from the maternal body it is called a neonate. Whether the birth is vaginal or by caesarean section, and whether the neonate is ultimately viable, is irrelevant.
Ectogenesis is the growth of an organism in an artificial environment outside the body in which it would normally be found, such as the growth of an embryo or fetus outside the mother's body, or the growth of bacteria outside the body of a host. The term was coined by British scientist J.B.S. Haldane in 1924.
An artificial womb or artificial uterus is a device that would allow for extracorporeal pregnancy by growing a fetus outside the body of an organism that would normally carry the fetus to term.
Pregnancy is the time during which one or more offspring develops (gestates) inside a woman's uterus (womb). A multiple pregnancy involves more than one offspring, such as with twins.
Prenatal development includes the development of the embryo and of the fetus during a viviparous animal's gestation. Prenatal development starts with fertilization, in the germinal stage of embryonic development, and continues in fetal development until birth.
Controversy over the beginning of pregnancy occurs in different contexts, particularly as it is discussed within the debate of abortion in the United States. Because an abortion is defined as ending an established pregnancy, rather than as destroying a fertilized egg, depending on when pregnancy is considered to begin, some methods of birth control as well as some methods of infertility treatment might be classified as causing abortions.
Fetal rights are the moral rights or legal rights of the human fetus under natural and civil law. The term fetal rights came into wide usage after Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark case that legalized abortion in the United States. The concept of fetal rights has evolved to include the issues of maternal substance use disorders, including alcohol use disorder and opioid use disorder. Most international human rights charters "clearly reject claims that human rights should attach from conception or any time before birth." While international human rights instruments lack a universal inclusion of the fetus as a person for the purposes of human rights, the fetus is granted various rights in the constitutions and civil codes of several countries.
The genetics and abortion issue is an extension of the abortion debate and the disability rights movement. Since the advent of forms of prenatal diagnosis, such as amniocentesis and ultrasound, it has become possible to detect the presence of congenital disorders in the fetus before birth. Specifically, disability-selective abortion is the abortion of fetuses that are found to have non-fatal mental or physical defects detected through prenatal testing. Many prenatal tests are now considered routine, such as testing for Down syndrome. Women who are discovered to be carrying fetuses with disabilities are often faced with the decision of whether to abort or to prepare to parent a child with disabilities.
In Judaism, views on abortion draw primarily upon the legal and ethical teachings of the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, the case-by-case decisions of responsa, and other rabbinic literature. While all major Jewish religious movements allow or encourage abortion in order to save the life of a pregnant woman, authorities differ on when and whether it is permitted in other cases.
A fetus or foetus is the unborn offspring that develops from an animal embryo. Following embryonic development, the fetal stage of development takes place. In human prenatal development, fetal development begins from the ninth week after fertilization and continues until birth. Prenatal development is a continuum, with no clear defining feature distinguishing an embryo from a fetus. However, a fetus is characterized by the presence of all the major body organs, though they will not yet be fully developed and functional and some not yet situated in their final anatomical location.
The beginning of human personhood is the moment when a human is first recognized as a person. There are differences of opinion as to the precise time when human personhood begins and the nature of that status. The issue arises in a number of fields including science, religion, philosophy, and law, and is most acute in debates relating to abortion, stem cell research, reproductive rights, and fetal rights.
Reproductive immunology refers to a field of medicine that studies interactions between the immune system and components related to the reproductive system, such as maternal immune tolerance towards the fetus, or immunological interactions across the blood-testis barrier. The concept has been used by fertility clinics to explain fertility problems, recurrent miscarriages and pregnancy complications observed when this state of immunological tolerance is not successfully achieved. Immunological therapy is a method for treating many cases of previously "unexplained infertility" or recurrent miscarriage.
Immune tolerance in pregnancy or maternal immune tolerance is the immune tolerance shown towards the fetus and placenta during pregnancy. This tolerance counters the immune response that would normally result in the rejection of something foreign in the body, as can happen in cases of spontaneous abortion. It is studied within the field of reproductive immunology.
Foeticide, or feticide, is the act of killing a fetus, or causing a miscarriage. Definitions differ between legal and medical applications, whereas in law, feticide frequently refers to a criminal offense, in medicine the term generally refers to a part of an abortion procedure in which a provider intentionally induces fetal demise to avoid the chance of an unintended live birth, or as a standalone procedure in the case of selective reduction.
Definitions of abortion vary from one source to another. Abortion has many definitions that can differ from each other in significant ways. Given the contentious nature of abortion, lawmakers and other stakeholders often face controversy in defining abortion. Language referring to abortion often reflects societal and political opinions . Influential non-state actors like the United Nations and the Roman Catholic Church have also engendered controversy over efforts to define abortion.
Fetal resorption is the disintegration and assimilation of one or more fetuses in the uterus at any stage after the completion of organogenesis, which, in humans, is after the ninth week of gestation. Before organogenesis, the process is called embryo resorption. Resorption is more likely to happen early on in the gestation than later on; a later death of a fetus is likely to result in a miscarriage.
Reproductive loss, sometimes reproductive grief, describes a potential emotional response to unsuccessful attempts at human reproduction or family-building. These experienced losses may include involuntary childlessness generally, pregnancy loss from all causes, perinatal death, stillbirth, infecundity and infertility from all causes, failed attempts to conceive, failed fertility treatments, failed gestational surrogacy procedures, and losses related to all dimensions of the adoption process. Responses to miscarriage, stillbirth, selective reduction and neonatal death are a subtype of reproductive loss called perinatal bereavement.
References
- ↑ "Embryo Loss - MeSH - NCBI". www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. Retrieved 26 June 2020.
- ↑ "Fetal Resorption - MeSH - NCBI". www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.
- ↑ Jarvis, GE (2016). "Early embryo mortality in natural human reproduction: What the data say". F1000Research. 5: 2765. doi: 10.12688/f1000research.8937.2 . PMC 5443340 . PMID 28580126.
- 1 2 Delaney, James (2023). "Embryo Loss and Moral Status" . Journal of Medicine and Philosophy. 48 (3): 252–264. doi:10.1093/jmp/jhad010. PMID 37061803.
- ↑ Kavanagh, Kathryn (September 2022). "Most human embryos naturally die after conception – restrictive abortion laws fail to take this embryo loss into account". The Conversation.
- ↑ Kovalevsky, George; Patrizio, Pasquale (1 September 2002). "Embryo loss in assisted reproductive technologies (ART)". Fertility and Sterility. 78: S256. doi: 10.1016/S0015-0282(02)04088-8 .
- ↑ Kaye, Randi; Nedelman, Michael (May 12, 2018). "'Our future children': Families speak after loss of frozen embryos in tank failure". CNN. Retrieved 2020-06-26.
