Seeking support for abortion care from national hotlines in Canada: Caller characteristics and call outcomes, 2019–2021
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: Both the National Abortion Federation Canada and Action Canada for Sexual Health and Rights operate national toll-free hotlines that provide information, financial support, and travel assistance to abortion seekers. We aimed to characterize callers to both hotlines before and after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. METHODS: Hotline personnel routinely document information about callers and type(s) of assistance needed and received. We received call logs from both organizations for a two-year period (April 1, 2019 through March 31, 2021). We exported these data to Microsoft Excel® and analyzed them using descriptive statistics. We analyzed case notes for content and themes. RESULTS: Over the study period, the two hotlines worked with 270 unique callers. Nearly two-thirds of callers (n = 174) were seeking support to obtain abortion care for pregnancies after 14 weeks gestation, including 69 callers (26%) who were at or beyond 24 weeks gestation. Most callers were seeking support to obtain abortion care outside of their province of residence because services at their gestational age were not available. Caller needs were similar before and after the onset of the pandemic, but fewer traveled to the United States for abortion care in the COVID-19 era. DISCUSSION: Assistance hotlines play an important role in helping some abortion seekers navigate the Canadian health system to obtain needed abortion care. The needs of those seeking care after the 14 weeks gestation points to gaps in current service availability. Identifying ways to expand later abortion care in Canada, particularly after 24 weeks, appears warranted.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 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 it