A new study has found that the number of women accessing medical abortions is increasing.
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However, the study, published by the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health this month, found that there are still many barriers to women accessing termination services.
It listed cost, awareness, and geographical isolation as the main hurdles.
It recommended that policy reform should “focus on reducing costs and enhancing early access”.
Launceston general practitioner Jan Radford agreed with the study’s outcomes.
“The cost and the access is a major issue,” Dr Radford said.
The study averaged that that the Medicare rebated cost of a medical abortion was $560, and a surgical abortion carried an average pricetag of $470.
Dr Radford said many women still did not know much about medical abortions, including how to access them and what they involved.
She further said that even though medical abortion medication (mifepristone, which is combined with misoprostol to perform the service) was made available in Australia in 2012, the processes surrounding it had not been changed to “complement” it.
Paul Hyland launched the Tabbot Foundation out of Tasmania in September 2015. It is a not-for-profit online medical termination service, which still ticks all the process boxes, but posts the medication to the client.
Women are able to request the service by calling the foundation’s hotline. It costs $250 in total.
While Dr Hyland said he agreed with some of the outcomes provided by the study, he said some of its data was “not very revealing”, and that it did not include data from the foundation.
His data showed that the rate of Tasmanian women utilising medical terminations over surgical ones “far (exceeded) the national average”.
He said the barriers to abortion in Tasmanian included unawareness, and a reluctance to choose a new method.
