abortion

IPA: ʌbˈɔrʃʌn

(medicine) The expulsion from the womb of a foetus or embryo before it is fully developed, with loss of the foetus.
A spontaneous abortion; a miscarriage.
An induced abortion.
(now rare) An aborted foetus; an abortus.
(figuratively) A misshapen person or thing; a monstrosity.
(figuratively) Failure or abandonment of a project, promise, goal etc.
(biology) Arrest of development of any organ, so that it remains an imperfect formation or is absorbed.
The cessation of an illness or disease at a very early stage.

Examples of "abortion" in Sentences

American representatives explicitly came to me and asked me to remove the word abortion from our draft, he said.
When an abortion (or miscarriage) takes place by itself, without any outside aid, we call it _spontaneous abortion_.
Mrs Parkes: Unfortunately the term abortion actually refers to any pregnancy ending prior to viability or therabouts.
The term abortion is also applied, though less properly, to cases in which the child is become viable, but does not survive the delivery.
The term abortion is tucked away somewhere in their heads in a file holding the vague lexicon of "stuff I understand that I should oppose."
Sorrough says that Won then contacted POPLINE and asked if there had been any changes in the database and the administrator replied that, yes, they had decided to turn the term abortion into a "stop word."
The laity does not like the term abortion, as it is under the impression that the term always signifies criminal abortion; it therefore prefers to use the term miscarriage ( "miss"), regardless of the time at which the expulsion of the fetus takes place.
Since the term abortion is apt to carry with it the implication of a criminal act, confusion will be avoided if we agree for the time to depart from strictly medical usage and designate as miscarriage the spontaneous termination of pregnancy prior to the twenty-eighth week.