Talk:Pregnancy with abortive outcome

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Question[edit]

What is the difference in a pregnancy with abortive outcome and a miscarriage? Sectionworker (talk) 22:13, 15 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Layperson's understanding: there isn't a difference between "pregnancy with abortive outcome" and "miscarriage," just a distinction.

A miscarriage is a *spontaneous abortion* -- it happens without any interventions. But if you take misoprostol and the same sequence of events happen, it's an *induced abortion*. Similarly if a woman is triggered into contractions by the insertion of cervadil and an IV of pitocin at 32 weeks because her fetus already died or is dying or is killing her, that's an *induced abortion*. If you wait for a while to see if she "spontaneously aborts" then it's back to miscarriage. But of course it's very easy to get septic having dead tissue inside a uterus etc etc.

All that said, "pregnancy with abortive outcome" is the language of paperwork. It appears in long trees of medical billing codes. Probably it appears in complex medical histories of patients with high-risk pregnancies. But no midwife or doctor or nurse ever talks to a patient about "so I'm sorry to hear about your pregnancy with abortive outcome." jengod (talk) 01:55, 16 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]