Medical abortion via telemedicine for women and adolescents: Experience from Moldova
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Introduction To pilot and evaluate the safety and participant satisfaction of the first‐ever telemedicine medical abortion service provided in Moldova, a lower‐income country located in Eastern Europe. Methods Before enrolment, each participant confirmed their pregnancy with a urine pregnancy test, ultrasound and/or blood test and calculated the gestational age based on the last menstrual period. After study consent was obtained, the study clinician confirmed eligibility for medical abortion and the study and provided counselling via videoconference or telephone. Eligible participants received medications by mail or prescription. A follow‐up call to assess abortion outcome, adverse events and other medical history was conducted 1 week after participants took mifepristone. A pregnancy test was taken 4 weeks after taking mifepristone for a final evaluation of the abortion outcome. The analysis was descriptive. Results Between March 2020 and March 2021, 549 eligibility screenings were conducted, and 531 study packages containing medications or prescriptions were sent to pregnant women and adolescents with gestations ≤9 weeks since the last menstrual period. The majority of procedures ( n = 477, 89.8%) were completed without an in‐person visit. Final abortion outcome was available for 499/531 (94.0%) medical abortion procedures: 484/499 (97.0%) were complete abortions, 11 (2.2%) were surgical completions (seven incomplete abortions and four continuing pregnancies), and four participants (0.8%) decided to keep their pregnancy. One serious adverse event occurred. Acceptability of the service was high (99.0% very satisfied or satisfied) and 86.5% of participants reported a future preference for telemedicine. The most commonly reported reasons for choosing the telemedicine service were convenience ( n = 286, 56.2%) and confidentiality ( n = 202, 39.7%). Conclusion The medical abortion via telemedicine service has proven to be a safe and acceptable option for women and adolescents in Moldova. This model has the potential to increase access to abortion, including during emergencies like the COVID‐19 pandemic.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".