A qualitative study of abortion professionals’ perspectives on doula support
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE(S): Doulas provide non-clinical support to people in pregnancy, labour and delivery, and, increasingly, to abortion-seekers. Even in contexts of decriminalization and proactive policy efforts to enhance access, barriers to abortion persist, especially for patients experiencing intersecting forms of oppression. Abortion doulas may play a role in improving access. This qualitative study explores the potential involvement of doulas in abortion services from the perspective of abortion health professionals and clinic administrative staff. STUDY DESIGN: This is a qualitative study. Participants were asked about experiences with doulas and potential doula contributions to abortion services. Data were analysed using thematic analysis. RESULTS: We conducted two focus groups and five individual interviews for a total of 18 participants. Participants perceived challenges to incorporating doulas formally into the abortion clinic setting, although they saw the possibility for doula support before and after receipt of abortion services. CONCLUSION(S): Our findings suggest abortion health professionals and clinic administrative staff perceive roles for doulas largely external to the clinical setting, to provide support for equity-deserving groups. They have concerns about the presence of doulas in the clinic due to policies against support people and because of the unregulated, unstandardized nature of doula practice. IMPLICATIONS: This qualitative study addresses the potential for integration of doulas with abortion care from the perspective of abortion clinic health professional and administrative staff. To our knowledge, this is the first study on this topic in Canada.
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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 | 0.017 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".