4.3.1 Household income and medical abortion
As the costs of childbearing and parenting increase, households with low incomes struggle to support women to continue their pregnancies. By exploring mechanisms influencing the socioeconomic conditions leading to abortion, it was found that in Russia an increase of $1,000 in per capita gross regional product (GRP) led to a reduction in the abortion rate of 0.075[18]. Socioeconomic status is a closely associated with employment status, which is an important factor leading medical abortion demonstrated by Klutsey EE, et al[19].
Based on the data that economic conditions were procyclically associated with abortion rates from approximately 2004 to 2010, with abortion rates declining by approximately 5 per cent for every percentage point increase in the unemployment rate during that period, it can be argued that economic conditions may be an important factor influencing women’s reproductive choices in the United States[20]. On the contrary, in Ghana, the risk of abortion is considerably higher among wealthy women[21, 22].
It should be noted, however, that the associations observed in these conventional epidemiological studies suffered from the limitations of modest sample sizes, reverse causality, and the inability to fully alleviate confounding effects. Using MR method, our study reliably concluded that HI was negatively associated with the risk of medical abortion.