Armed Conflict and Pregnancy Termination: Evidence from Burkina Faso

The mental and physical toll of conflict-related stressors-such as safety concerns, food insecurity, and loss of income-may have significant and deleterious impacts on birth outcomes among pregnant women. Armed conflict disrupts people's lives, often limiting access to essential resources and healthcare services (e.g., abortion-related healthcare). We investigated the relationship between armed conflict and pregnancy termination among pregnant women (aged 15-49) in Burkina Faso using health data from the Performance Monitoring for Action (PMA) project and armed conflict event data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Project (UCDP). We found that pregnancies exposed to armed conflict in the first trimester were less likely to end in pregnancy termination compared to pregnancies that were not exposed to armed conflict in the first trimester, though we are unable to disentangle spontaneous versus induced terminations in these data. Thus, we cannot determine whether this finding is driven largely by one type of abortion or another, nor can we be sure that the effects are not counteracting each other. Because interruption of healthcare access is a common consequence of armed conflict, abortion-related services should be targeted and adapted to suit the specific needs and obstacles faced by pregnant women in conflict-affected places.