For several decades, the incidence of childhood autism has been growing at an alarming rate in North America, and elsewhere around the world. Autism is a hugely expensive mental malady that also causes much stress within families and has led in some cases to parents divorcing.
Can anything be done to reduce the risk of childhood autism? It has already been established that babies born prematurely (under 37 weeks’ gestation), are at a much higher—7 percent—risk of autism than babies born after a full-term delivery (under 2 percent). Numerous studies have also established that women who undergo induced abortions have a much higher subsequent risk of giving birth prematurely. Within the past few years there have been more and more studies indicating that women who have abortions have a much higher risk of subsequently bearing a child with autism. Yet there has been virtually no public discussion of these findings.
The global incidence of autism is now around one in 160 children. In North America, the rise has been much more dramatic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta reports that the prevalence of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) has reached nearly 2 percent, or one child in 54. Poland stands out as a major exception to this alarming phenomenon, for reasons that we’ll discuss below.
A variety of risk factors for autism have been identified. Maternal age is one—the older the mother, the higher the chance that her baby will be born with autism. Sex is also a risk factor. Boys are four to five times more likely to be born with autism than girls. Being born prematurely, or with a low birth weight, is also connected with an increased risk of later development of autism.
Yet there’s one major factor that’s never discussed outside the pages of specialized medical journals. That factor is induced abortion.
We have counted no fewer than eight studies over the past 22 years in respected medical journals—several of them from China—all pointing to abortion as a major risk factor for autism.
As early as 1999 an international group of researchers reported in the Journal of Perinatal Medicine that a woman who terminates one or more pregnancies through induced abortion, miscarriage, or still birth, has almost double the risk of delivering a baby later diagnosed with autism. Three years later, a paper in the International Journal of Neuroscience revealed that abortions were “significantly more common” among women who bore autistic children than among women who did not. In fact, abortions were among the three most significant factors linked to autism.
By Ian Gentles
