Patient experiences throughout the care timeline
| Theme | Illustrative quote |
| Abortion information | My doctor gave me a referral. And then, I called the call center and just said, hey. My doctor’s given me a referral, basically. And then, I asked about the options, and they explained the difference between a medical abortion and a surgical abortion…So then, I asked them because I was like, I had a look on your website. And it was like, the telemedicine one is cheaper. And they said, oh, yeah. That can be done over the phone. You need to get your scans and stuff done by a GP first. The scans and the blood work. And, at that point in time, I already had done my scans and blood work, or I had done all my blood work. And I was already booked in for a scan. So, yes. It was a cheaper option. Because I wanted to do the tele-abortion. The reason I went with telemedicine was because it was cheaper. (Participant 28) |
| Decision making | The option was to either go into the clinic, and if the times worked out to use the medication or if it was too late to do surgical. But when I found out it was—the clinic was in Midland, so it’s probably an hour away from where I was. And obviously, you can’t bring children. Yeah. I threw that out the window, because I don’t—my mother was away on holiday, so I couldn’t get her to watch the kids. And it would have, yeah, been a little bit hard to get there, and to wait as well. So it seemed a lot more convenient to do it from home. (Participant 14) |
| Referral experience | Well, when I first went in I went in with my partner, and the doctor had a big cross around her neck. So I was thinking, oh goodness, here we go. I thought she was gonna give me a hard time. And she was as much as she could she was putting the hard word on me not to go through with it, but in a very loving and respectful way. I never felt that she was putting her beliefs there, although she was letting me know what her beliefs were. She kept on saying even at the last minute, even if you’ve got the pills, you don’t need to take it. You do have a choice. You’re not too old. You can do it. I was like thank you. But I’ve already made up my mind. (Participant 21) |
| Medical abortion appointment experience | I thought it was great, because—well, especially for someone like myself living three-and-a-half hours away. And to be honest, I didn’t want to go into a clinic. I didn’t want to have that. It was nice to be able to do it from my house and not have to actually go in there and sit in the waiting room with other people and that sort of thing. So it was very comforting to be able to do it in your own house. (Participant 16) |
| Follow-up experience | We went through my hormone levels to make sure that they had dropped. They did, which was great. She was just making sure that me, myself was okay. (Participant 13) |