Rare new data has shown pregnancy terminations are being carried out at a major Queensland hospital as late as 37 weeks.
Jackie Sinnerton The Courier Mail | September 12, 2022 - 12:01AM
Pregnancy terminations are being conducted as late as 37 weeks at Brisbane hospitals with foetal medical experts insisting the services are essential as not all abnormalities are detectable in early pregnancy.
Late terminations are carried out in Queensland due to foetal aneuploidy, genetic syndromes, late evolving structural abnormalities or when the woman has a severe medical condition. However, data on these late terminations is limited.
Professor Sailesh Kumar, senior staff specialist in Maternal Foetal Medicine and Obstetrics at the Royal Brisbane Women’s Hospital, was involved in the investigation of the rates of and reasons for late pregnancy termination at the Centre for Advanced Prenatal Care at RBWH over the past decade.
It was revealed that the annual number of late terminations increased from 20 in 2010 to 54 in 2020, but terminations declined between 2010 and 2014, which the experts say was probably because practitioners “feared prosecution for terminating pregnancies following a 2009 criminal prosecution for termination of pregnancy in Queensland”.
When the Termination of Pregnancy Act 2018 came into force, it ended criminal regulation of terminations and during 2014–2020, the number of terminations at the hospital steadily increased again, Professor Kumar and her team found.
“During 2010‒2020, 305 late terminations were undertaken at 22 weeks’ gestation or later,” the study released on Monday in the Medical Journal of Australia said.
“The annual number of late terminations increased from 20 in 2010 to 54 in 2020. The median gestational age at late termination was consistent across the decade was 24 weeks and six days, ranging from 17 weeks to 37 weeks and one day. The most frequent foetal indications for late termination were neurological abnormalities (36 per cent), aneuploidy or genetic syndromes (22 per cent), and cardiac malformations (19 per cent).
Since 2018, Queensland law requires two specialists to review and support any request for late termination before it is undertaken.
“At RBWH there is clear institutional support for the termination of pregnancy service from the Women’s and Newborn Services division of Metro North Health. As a result, the number of referrals from other Queensland hospitals (from within and outside the RBWH catchment zone) and by general practitioners and private ultrasound and obstetric care providers increased,” the experts found.
Professor Kumar reported that advances in prenatal imaging and genomics meant that women can now be given much more information about their foetus and can make more informed decisions about late termination.
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