Abortion information largely ‘buried’ on most US hospital websites

Despite being a routine procedure at many hospitals, abortion is not mentioned by almost 80 per cent of health system websites, a new study has found.

The report, published in Annals of Internal Medicine, has revealed that a lack of disclosure may contribute to stigma around abortion procedures in the US.

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 could 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 US hospitals in states without extreme abortion bans, including those with specialised abortion training programmes, to measure how often they offer information about abortion and its provision at their facilities compared with colonoscopy, another common procedure performed in both outpatient offices and hospitals.

The team found that 79.4 per cent of patient-facing websites did not mention abortion, compared with 11.1 per cent 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 reported that for websites offering information about abortion, 89.8 per cent omitted patient instructions for pre- or postprocedural care, compared with 42.2 per cent 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.

They said: “In summary, our results suggest that hospitals and their health systems are not advertising abortion in a manner consistent with other outpatient procedures nor consistent with medical society statements that abortion is routine, essential health care.”