Hospitals Rarely Include Abortion Information on Their Websites

WEDNESDAY, Oct. 18, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- Hospitals rarely include abortion information on their websites, and those that do usually omit patient instructions for preprocedural or postprocedural care, according to a research letter published online Oct. 17 in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Ari B. Friedman, M.D., Ph.D., from the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia, and colleagues examined the websites of U.S. hospitals to assess how often they offer information about abortion and its provision at their facilities compared to other common ambulatory procedures, including colonoscopy. A total of 222 hospitals were sampled.

The researchers found that 79.4 percent of patient-facing websites did not mention abortion compared with 11.1 percent for colonoscopy. The information was found a mean of 0.5 pages lower in the search engine results when hospitals did mention a procedure. Websites described offering abortion care 6.3 percent of the time and colonoscopy 85.6 percent of the time. Websites were at least 70 percent less likely to describe offering abortion than colonoscopy within subgroups defined by hospital size, profit orientation, and academic status. Among the websites offering abortion information, patient instructions for preprocedural or postprocedural care were omitted in 89.8 percent compared with 42.2 percent of websites offering colonoscopy.

"Our results suggest that hospitals and their health systems are not advertising abortion in a manner consistent with other outpatient procedures nor consistent with medical society statements that abortion is routine, essential health care," the authors write.

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