Understanding miscarriage or insensitive abortion: Time for more defined terminology?, ,

A search of the two major journals of obstetrics and gynecology published in the United States has shown that the word abortion rather than miscarriage to describe early pregnancy loss is 6 times more likely to be used compared with most other English language journals over the last 5 years. The use of miscarriage, with descriptive adjectives such as threatened, incomplete, and complete, is recommended and the term delayed miscarriage is suggested in place of missed abortion. (Am J Obstet Gynecol 1998;179:397-8.)