Can I get an Abortion Without my Parents’ Permission? Publicly Available Information About Age and Parental Consent for Abortion in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: This study aimed to investigate the availability and clarity of online abortion access information in Canada and identify, through the lens of a minor, if websites provide a clear answer to: "Can I get an abortion without my parents' permission?" METHODS: Using ChoiceConnect, 139 abortion providers and 17 health resource websites were identified for analysis. Provider information was searched to discover an associated website. Identified websites were searched using Boolean operators for plain-language keywords on abortion access for minors ('abortion,' 'consent,' 'permission,' 'parent,' or 'age,') followed by manual searches. Results were classified as: (1) no abortion information; (2) no consent information; or (3) included consent information. Those that included consent information were further categorized thematically as either (1) statements that parental consent is not required; (2) statement regarding capacity to consent; or (3) stating an age of consent. These categories overlapped in some cases. RESULTS: Of the 139 providers, 72 had identifiable websites. Of those, 14 (19%) did not mention abortion and 28 (39%) provided information about parental or age of consent. Among those 28, 20 (74%) stated no parental consent was required, 10 (37%) mentioned capacity to consent, and 6 (22%) indicated an age to consent. Overall, 75% of providers and resources did not have a website, mention abortion, or provide consent information. CONCLUSIONS: There is a lack of clear information online about minors' abortion care access without parental consent. Absence of information presents a substantial barrier to abortion care access for minors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.035 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".