As access to clinical abortion care becomes increasingly restricted in the United States, the need for self-managed abortions (i.e. abortions taking place outside of the formal healthcare setting) may increase. We examine the safety, effectiveness, and acceptability of self-managed medication abortion provided using online telemedicine.
We retrospectively examined records of the outcomes of abortions provided by the sole online telemedicine service providing self-managed medication abortion in the U.S. We calculated the prevalence of successful medication abortion (the proportion who ended their pregnancy without surgical intervention); the prevalence of serious adverse events (the proportions who received intravenous antibiotics and blood transfusion); and assessed whether any deaths were reported to the service. We also examined the proportions who were satisfied and felt self-management was the right choice.