Last week, the journal JAMA Network Open published a study that found that Canadian teenagers who became pregnant were more likely to die before reaching their 31st birthday. The researchers obtained comprehensive data from Ontario’s health registry. They were able to analyze data from over 2 million Canadian females alive at twelve years of age between 1991 and 2021. This study has been covered by a number of media outlets including the New York Times, Spectrum News, and Yahoo! Canada. ...

Interestingly, the study purportedly finds that pregnant Canadian teens who obtained abortions had lower mortality rates than pregnant Canadian teens who carried pregnancies to term. However, I would recommend interpreting this finding with caution. This is for several reasons.

First, teens who obtained abortions were still 40 percent more likely to die prematurely than teens who never became pregnant in the first place.