Measurements
Outcomes included: numbers and rates of women who self-managed medical
abortion, their age, socioeconomic situation, country of living,
knowledge on medical abortion, rate of reported ongoing pregnancy,
surgical intervention, complete abortion, blood transfusion, if they
found it acceptable to receive telemedical abortion service method, if
the abortion pill was the appropriate method and if they would recommend
the service to a friend(11,
12). Ongoing pregnancy is defined as the
failure of medical abortion(19). The Medical
Abortion Reporting Efficacy (MARE) guidelines recommend defining a
medical abortion to be successful when there is a “successful expulsion
of the intrauterine pregnancy without the need for surgical
intervention”, i.e. a complete abortion(19). Lastly, a blood
transfusion is an adverse event which is often measured as an indication
of safety (17).
Countries were initially divided into UN geographic regions and
sub-regions (20). As
the frequencies of evaluations and representation of countries showed to
be extremely varied, it was concluded to be a misleading classification.
Thus, only the top 10 most frequent countries were included for an
overview, as they accounted for 84,3% of the total sample, and 84,9%
after inclusion criteria.