Safe Abortion

Using Natural Language Processing to Describe the Use of an Online Community for Abortion During 2022: Dynamic Topic Modeling Analysis of Reddit Posts

Elizabeth Pleasants
Ndola Prata
Ushma D Upadhyay
Cassondra Marshall
Coye Cheshire
2025
Background Abortion access in the United States has been in a state of rapid change and increasing restriction since the Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision from the US Supreme Court in June 2022. With further constraints on access to abortion since Dobbs, the internet and online communities are playing an increasingly important role in people’s abortion trajectories. There is a need for a broader understanding of how online resources are used for abortion and how they may reflect changes in the sociopolitical and legal context of abortion access. Research...

Innovation through telemedicine to improve medication abortion access in primary health centers: findings from a pilot study in Musanze District, Rwanda

Ndola Prata
Karen Weidert
Evangeline Dushimeyesu
Eugène Kanyamanza
Dushimiyimana Blaise
Sharon Umutesi
Eugène Ngoga
Felix Sayinzoga
2025

In 2012 Rwanda expanded legal grounds for abortion to include cases of rape, incest, forced marriage, the health of a pregnant person or fetus at risk, and for minors on request in 2018. The penal code limits abortion care to doctors in hospitals, impeding access for many women. We tested an intervention that provides first-trimester medication abortion at primary health centers, using telemedicine to connect nurses/midwives to doctors in district hospitals for authorization of services. We implemented a 15-month prospective study to assess the feasibility, effectiveness, safety, and...

Have Others Had This Experience? A Qualitative Analysis of Posts on Self-Managed Abortion to US-Based Reddit Community

Karen Weidert
Ndola Prata
Lindsay Parham
Eliza Dolgins
Emma Anderson
Elizabeth Pleasants
2025

Objectives: Limiting abortion within the formal health care system is associated with more self-managed abortion (SMA). Reddit is a publicly available social networking site that allows users to create and join communities (“subreddits”) around a specific topic. R/abortion is a subreddit dedicated to providing support and advice to people seeking or having an abortion. The purpose of this study is to analyze r/abortion data after the Dobbs leak in 2022 to explore SMA access and use experiences shared in the community.

Methods: We employed a hybrid qualitative thematic analysis...

Behavioral Innovations to Access Abortion Post-Dobbs: A Qualitative Thematic Analysis of Reddit’s r/abortion Community in 2022

Eliza Dolgins
Lindsay Parham
Karen Weidert
Emma Anderson
Coye Cheshire
Ndola Prata
Elizabeth Pleasants
2025

Following the leak of the Dobbs decision in 2022, abortion access in the United States has faced heightened barriers, including legal restrictions, financial constraints, and logistical challenges. In response, individuals seeking abortion care can employ innovative behavioral strategies to overcome these barriers and reshape their abortion experiences (ie, “behavioral innovations”). This paper explores the behavioral innovations to access abortion that people discussed and recommended within a geographically dispersed community of peers on an abortion-supportive Reddit community (r/...

Abortion safety in Ghana: does motivation matter?. BMC Public Health

Karen Weidert
Jalang Conteh
Maureen Lahiff
Kim Harley
Ndola Prata
2025

In Ghana, abortion is restricted except on a few legal grounds. About 11% of maternal deaths in Ghana are due to unsafe abortion. This study investigated the association between abortion motivation (the primary reason women sought abortion) and abortion safety.

To read the complete article, please click here.

RU-486. Termination of a pregnancy in the privacy of one’s home

Malcolm Potts
1989

PIP: This is an outline of the therapeutic uses of RU-486, followed by clarification of the term “contragestion”, and analyses of the theological, legal, and corporate-political issues confronting acceptance of this drug. RU-486 is a computer-designed progesterone antagonist with no known side effects other than those predicted by its endocrinological action. It has been used to terminate pregnancy (with prostaglandin) up to 41 days amenorrhea, and has been shown to terminate pregnancy with fetal demise, to cause luteolysis in the late menstrual cycle, to facilitate management of ectopic...

"Berkeley professor from Angola talks about the threat to abortion rights—globally"

May 22, 2022
48 Hills

a woman professor with short dark curly hair wearing glasses smiling at you

Professor Ndola Prata MD, MSc was interviewed by 48 Hills to speak about abortion rights globally. She discussed important aspects of medical demography, population, and family planning, and maternal, child, and adolescent health worldwide, with special emphasis on law and social justice. To read the complete article,...

Tsunami and the silent tide: the invisible challenge of women’s health

Martha Campbell
2005

Women suffered differentially in the tsunami disaster. While the total death toll will never be known accurately, it is known that more women and children died than men. Among the survivors it is the special needs of women that are being overlooked.

Given the rapid growth in the number of young fertile women, it is possible that more women will die from pregnancy, childbirth and abortion in the current decade than in any other in human history. With steps that we know how to take, we should be able now to roll back the silent tide of maternal death.

Published in Journal of...

Saving maternal lives in resource-poor settings: Facing reality

Ndola Prata
Amita Sreenivas
Farnaz Vahidnia
Malcolm Potts
2009

Literature review to identify interventions that require minimal treatment/infrastructure and are not dependent on skilled providers. Simulations were run to assess the potential number of maternal lives that could be saved through intervention implementation according to potential program impact. Regional and country level estimates are provided as examples of settings that would most benefit from proposed interventions.

Three interventions were identified: (i) improve access to contraception; (ii) increase efforts to reduce deaths from unsafe abortion; and (iii) increase access to...

Abortion perspectives

Malcolm Potts
2010

A look at abortion from the perspective of a doctor who has performed abortions, a physician who also has a PhD in embryology, and someone who had the privilege of working all over the world in various aspects of human reproduction and sexuality.

Published in The European Journal of Contraception and Reproductive Health Care, June 2010;15:157–159

Download PDF, click here.