Unwanted pregnancies: Publicly available information for women seeking abortion care in Ontario

Abstract

ObjectivesAlthough abortion is common, the inability to obtain a referral and social stigma often lead women to search online for abortion information. Searches may yield relevant services but may also include Crisis Pregnancy Centres (CPCs), whose mission is to dissuade women from seeking abortions. The objective of this study was to determine the type of abortion-related resources women searching for services near their community might find.MethodsWe included communities in Ontario with a population over 15,000 or a general hospital. Between, 07/27/2019 and 08/06/2019, we searched the community name followed by “abortion” on the anonymous Google proxy server StartPage. The first 5 Canadian resources were categorized as: sexual health resource (<200 km, ≥200 km), abortion resource (<200 km, ≥200 km), CPC or Irrelevant/Other. Descriptive statistics were generated for search results by category and the number and percent of communities with each result category.ResultsThere were 130 communities included. Searches yielded 648 discrete results which related to abortion services (41.9%), sexual health (10.3%) and CPCs (10.2%); 37.5% were irrelevant (news articles, unrelated services). Overall, 11.5% of communities had no sexual health or abortion resource within 200km, and 29.2% had no abortion specific resource within 200km. CPCs were among the top 5 results for 41.5% of communities.ConclusionsAlthough relevant sexual health and abortion resources comprised almost half the search results, over 10% of communities had no local resources listed and over 40% had a listed resource that could hinder timely access to abortion care