The role of healthcare providers in expanding legal abortion: Qualitative insights from Argentina, Ireland, and South Korea.

Abortion laws are key in creating an enabling environment that facilitates the advancement of people's sexual and reproductive health and rights. Around 50 countries have liberalized their abortion laws in the last decades by adding new grounds allowing abortion. The road toward the expansion of legal abortion is a long, highly sensitive, and difficult process.

Restrictive points of entry into abortion care in Ireland: a qualitative study of expectations and experiences with the service.

This article focuses on access to early medical abortion care under Section 12 of the Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018, in Ireland and identifies existing barriers resulting from gaps in current policy design. The article draws primarily on qualitative interviews with 24 service users, 20 primary healthcare providers in the community and 27 key informants, including from grassroots groups that work with women from different migrant communities, to examine service users' experiences accessing early medical abortions on request up to 12 weeks gestation. The interviews were part of a wider mixed-methods study from 2020-2021 examining the barriers and facilitators to the implementation of abortion policy in Ireland.

Abortion policy implementation in Ireland: successes and challenges in the establishment of hospital-based services.

Objective: To describe successes and highlight remaining challenges in the establishment of hospital-based abortion services after legal change in the Republic of Ireland.

Methods: We conducted a mixed-methods study on the implementation of abortion policy in Ireland. In this manuscript, we present the results from a qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews conducted with hospital-based providers, service users, and key informants.

Information flow as reproductive governance. Patient journey analysis of information barriers and facilitators to abortion care in the republic of Ireland.

Background: Information flow - information communication and transmission pathways and practices within healthcare systems - impacts patient journeys. Historically, regulating information flow was a key technology of reproductive governance in the Republic of Ireland. Pre-2018, law and the State sustained informational barriers to and through abortion care in Ireland.

Abortion policy implementation in Ireland: Lessons from the community model of care.

Background: In 2018, the right to lawful abortion in the Republic of Ireland significantly expanded, and service provision commenced on 1 January, 2019. Community provision of early medical abortion to 9 weeks plus 6 days gestation delivered by General Practitioners constitutes the backbone of the Irish abortion policy implementation. We conducted a study in 2020-2021 to examine the barriers and facilitators of the Irish abortion policy implementation.

Exploring providers' experience of stigma following the introduction of more liberal abortion care in the Republic of Ireland.

Objective: To explore if abortion care providers in the Republic of Ireland experience abortion-related stigma.

Study Design: The survey was distributed to abortion care providers working in community and hospital units nationwide. We measured stigma using the 35-item version of the Abortion Providers Stigma Scale (APSS).

Implementing and expanding safe abortion care: An international comparative case study of six countries.

We conducted a comparative case study-based investigation of health sector strategies that were useful in expanding or establishing new abortion services. We selected geographically diverse countries from across the human development index if they had implemented new abortion laws, or changed interpretations of existing laws or policies, within the past 15 years (Colombia, Ethiopia, Ghana, Portugal, South Africa, and Uruguay). Factors facilitating the expansion of services include use of a public health frame, situating abortion as one component of a comprehensive reproductive health package, and including country-based health and women's rights organizations, medical and other professional societies, and international agencies and nongovernment organizations in the design and rollout of services.

Safe abortion in South Africa: "We have wonderful laws but we don't have people to implement those laws".

In South Africa, abortion was legalized in 1996, during the nation's transition from apartheid to independence and democracy, under the Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act (CTOPA). The law drew from both a public health and rights-based framework. A coalition of advocates played a key role in passage.