Due to errors in ultrasounds and strict hospital policies about getting a second scan, women could be aborting live fetuses after being told by doctors that they have had a miscarriage, reports the Daily Mail.
Currently, hospital policy in the U.K. dictates that women do not need a second scan to confirm a miscarriage if the gestational sac which should hold the fetus is over two centimeters in length and appears to be empty.
A recent study published in the journal Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology, however, looked at over 1,000 British women and found that about one in 200 were still viably pregnant even after the scan was enough to declare a miscarriage.
Once a scan has supposedly confirmed a miscarriage, the women are then given the option to let the pregnancy terminate on its own, or they can take drugs to flush the fetus from their system or have it removed surgically.
"For most women, sadly there is nothing we can do to prevent a miscarriage," explained study author Tom Bourne.
"But we do need to make sure we don’t make things worse by intervening unnecessarily in ongoing pregnancies. We hope our work means that the guidelines to determine miscarriage are made as watertight as we would expect for determining death at any other stage of life."
The margin of error is enough for the researchers to recommend that the policies be changed, and for a second scan to be required on any gestational sac under 2.5 cm instead.
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