Pregnancy occurrence, intendedness, and outcomes among U.S. females with and without disability, 2011-2019.

The data are cross-sectional and self-reported, so the study can show that the two groups differ but cannot say what caused or followed what, including whether any of the unintended pregnancies involved sexual assault, which the authors say they could not determine. Disability was defined by six survey questions about difficulty walking, climbing stairs, hearing, seeing, learning/remembering/concentrating, self-care, or going out alone. The authors say these questions do not identify everyone with a disability. The sample was too small to separate disability types, so nothing here says whether the patterns hold for a woman with a mobility impairment as opposed to a sensory or cognitive one. Pregnancy intendedness was not asked directly. The authors worked it out from whether a pregnancy was reported as too soon or unwanted, and dropped pregnancies where the woman was unsure. Birth outcomes were counted per woman, not per pregnancy, so the numbers describe how many women had ever had a miscarriage, not the share of pregnancies that ended that way. This makes the figures look larger than the usual pregnancy-level rates. 1,410 respondents aged 45-49 were excluded because the survey only started collecting that age group in 2015, and a further 602 were excluded for missing covariate data, which may leave out women with less complete records.

No funding statement or competing-interest declaration appears in the supplied text. The only declaration is that the study was deemed exempt by the Brandeis University IRB as secondary data analysis.

Do not read this as proof that disability causes pregnancy loss, or as evidence that any programme works. The study is a cross-sectional survey of self-reported pregnancy histories, so it can show that the two groups differed but not why, and the authors themselves could not tell whether the unintended pregnancies followed sexual assault. Do not read the finding for younger disabled females as good news either: they were no more likely than their peers to have an unintended pregnancy, but they were more likely to have a miscarriage and other non-live birth outcomes.