“Trust Women”: Characteristics of and learnings from patients of a Shield Law medication abortion practice in the <scp>United States</scp>
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: The 2022 Massachusetts Shield Law protects telemedicine providers who care for abortion seekers in other states from criminal, civil, and licensure penalties. In this article we explore the characteristics of patients of The Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project (The MAP). METHODS: The MAP is an asynchronous telemedicine service that offers mifepristone/misoprostol to abortion seekers in all 50 states who are at or under 11 weeks pregnancy gestation on initial intake. The MAP charges USD250 using a pay-what-you-can model. We analyzed medical questionnaires and payments submitted by patients who received care from The MAP during its first 6 months of operations using descriptive statistics and for content and themes. RESULTS: From October 1, 2023-March 31, 2024, 1994 patients accessed care through The MAP. Almost all (n = 1973, 99%) identified as women/girls and about half (n = 984, 49%) were aged 20-29. The MAP cared for patients in 45 states; 84% (n = 1672) of these patients received pills in abortion ban or restricted southern states. Patients paid USD134.50 on average; 29% (n = 577) paid USD25 or less. Nearly two-thirds (n = 1293, 65%) received subsidized care; financial hardship featured prominently in patient comments. DISCUSSION: Considerable demand exists for medication abortion care from Shield Law providers. The MAP demonstrates that providers can trust women and other pregnancy capable people to decide for themselves whether to obtain medication abortion pills by mail and to pay what they can afford without being required to justify their need. Identifying ways to support Shield Law provision and further subsidize abortion care are needed.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 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