• World costs of Pregnancy termination: A systematic review
  • Maryam Soleimani Movahed,1 Saeed Husseini Barghazan,2,* Fariba Askari,3 Dariush Chivaee ,4
    1. Department of Health Economics, School of Health Management and Information Sciences, Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
    2. Health Management and Economics Research Center, Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
    3. Student research committee, Department of midwifery, school of nursing and midwifery, Mashhad University of medical sciences, Mashhad, Iran
    4. Health Management and Economics Research Center, Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran


  • Introduction: Annual cost of care for woman unsafe abortion complications treatment ranged from 159 to 333 US million $. Complications treatment of unsafe abortion can significantly drop-down health system costs, especially in areas with high rate of unsafe abortion and related high mortality rates. So, we aimed to gather all studies estimated economic burden of abortion.
  • Methods: A highly sensitive strategy was used to retrieve original studies, addressing the cost of abortion worldwide. PubMed, Web of science, Scopus and Embase databases were searched. All studies reported costs were attributed to both safe and unsafe abortion were included. Letter to editor, books, chapter of books, economic evaluation studies, reviews and studies without full text were excluded. Validated and standardized methods were used for data extraction and analysis.
  • Results: 2082 records were retrieved. Of which 31 were deemed eligible. Almost of safe abortion studies had been performed in the United States. Perspective also was so varied in different studies. Patient, society, government, etc. were used as perspective. Almost the studies reported per case cost of abortion. Nonetheless, some of them reported annually associated costs of related cares.
  • Conclusion: This study demonstrates that the treatment of abortion complications consumes a substantial amount of resources globally. Therefore, there is a need for providing safe abortion care services that are affordable in all facilities of the countries at large level with payer and provider cooperation to integrate this valuable care and to reduce abortion costs.
  • Keywords: Abortion, cost of illness, burden of disease, miscarriage, health expenditures