Dilatation and curettage for second-trimester abortions.

This study reports the outcome of 2,500 consecutive second-trimester abortions performed with the dilatation and curettage methods. Of the abortions, 99.2 per cent were for gestations between the fifteenth and eighteenth menstrual weeks of pregnancy. We determined that this procedure is both safer and less traumatic than intrauterine saline or prostaglandin instillation. The low incidence of uterine perforation (0.08 per cent) and over-all morbidity (2.8 per cent) and the short duration of hospitalization (average 1.1 days per patient per procedure), as well aa the absence of any death in our series, substantiate this premise.