Before undergoing an abortion, you should first confirm that you are indeed pregnant. This can be done by undergoing a home pregnancy test which can give a fairly accurate and early result about whether conception has occurred or not.
You should then give serious thought to the circumstances and consider all the options before taking the decision to abort pregnancy. You should take into account your mental and emotional state, your financial situation, whether you have the support system required to bring up a child, etc. You should also consider the risks of abortion and its possible long term consequences in terms of health.
If you do decide to go in for an abortion, then, based on your last monthly period, you can estimate how far along your pregnancy is. Based on this, you can pick one of the different methods or types of abortion.
Main Types of Abortion
There are 2 main types of abortion – Medical abortion and surgical abortion. These are the best regulated and the safest kinds of abortion that are most likely to succeed without causing complications. You should steer clear of so-called ‘natural’ or ‘herbal’ methods that are not regulated and could result in incomplete abortion and/or other problems for you.
Medical Abortion
This kind of abortion is done by using certain drugs or drug combinations to terminate the pregnancy. This form of abortion requires you to take certain pills and then wait for a couple of days before taking the rest of the dose for the abortion.
This causes the body to reject the pregnancy and the contents of the uterus will be expelled along with blood. The bleeding will continue for some time afterwards. This kind of abortion is more effective in the earlier part of pregnancy, and in an estimated 92% of cases, there is no need for any surgical intervention to complete the process of abortion.
Surgical Abortion
The most commonly used method of surgical abortion is the suction aspiration type of abortion in which an electrical or a manually operated device is used to remove the contents of the uterus using vacuum aspiration.
The second most commonly used type of surgical abortion is Dilation and Curettage in which the uterus is dilated and then its walls are curetted or cleaned using a curette. The possible complications after this procedure are relatively high, and so the method is not used unless vacuum aspiration is not available or the pregnancy is further advanced and not possible.