Factors influencing abortion care-seeking outside of formal healthcare settings: lived experiences from Rwandan young women
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Informal abortions, commonly known as unsafe abortions, refer to all induced abortions that occur outside of formal healthcare settings conducted without the assistance of a licensed, trained healthcare provider. Despite the legalization of safe induced abortion care services, informal abortions continue to be among the major causes of maternal mortality and morbidity among young women in Rwanda living in rural areas with limited or no access to safe abortion care services. The purpose of this qualitative study was to gain an in-depth understanding of the lived experience of seeking informal abortions from the perspective of young women in rural Rwanda and to identify the underlying factors for these women seeking abortion care services outside of the formal healthcare setting. METHODS: This qualitative study was guided by a descriptive phenomenology in rural Rwanda, specifically in a selected district located in the Northern Province of Rwanda. Ten young women between 18 and 24 years of age, who had the experience of seeking informal abortion services from informal providers within the last eight years participated in audio-recorded, in-depth, face-to-face interviews. Collected data were analyzed using Colaizzi's (1978) seven steps of the phenomenological method. RESULTS: The study found that young Rwandan women still seek unregulated abortions to end their unintended pregnancies due to limited access to or utilization of sexual reproductive health and rights services. Among the reasons for seeking abortion care services outside of the formal healthcare setting in Rwanda were sociocultural and economic factors and the stigma associated with terminating unintended pregnancies before marriage. CONCLUSION: In light of the findings of this study, the authors recommend the Ministry of Health and its stakeholders to expand access to comprehensive adolescent and youth-friendly reproductive health and reproductive rights while addressing the sociocultural stigma through public awareness and economic factors that play a big role in unregulated abortions rather than safe abortion care services.
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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) | 0.001 | 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 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".