Information about abortion care largely omitted or buried on 80% of health systems' patient-facing websites

A study of health systems' websites has found that despite being a routine procedure at many hospitals, abortion is not mentioned by almost 80% of health system websites. The research report is published in Annals of Internal Medicine.

Patients often rely on online resources to learn about medications and procedures, including abortion. Online searches for abortion services are becoming more common after the Dobbs Supreme Court decision. Patient-oriented webpages may play an important role in patients locating abortion providers, learning about the procedure, and scheduling care. However, it is unknown whether hospitals and their health systems offer these online resources.

Researchers from University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and Harvard Medical School studied websites of 222 U.S. hospitals in states without extreme abortion bans, including those with specialized abortion training programs, to measure how often they offer information about abortion and its provision at their facilities compared with colonoscopy, another common ambulatory procedure performed in both outpatient offices and hospitals.

They found that 79.4% of patient-facing websites did not mention abortion, compared with 11.1% for colonoscopy. When the websites did mention abortion services, the information was found a mean of 0.5 pages lower in search engine results. The authors also report that for websites offering information about abortion, 89.8% omitted patient instructions for pre- or postprocedural care, compared with 42.2% of websites offering information about colonoscopy.

According to the authors, their findings bring evidence to recent claims that hospitals have treated abortion care differently from other essential procedures, contributing to stigma surrounding abortion.