JANE’S LIST
A Platform for Abortion Clinics
3 months — 2023
Erica Fink, Elaine Gao, Yifan Zhang
Problem statement
Jane’s List is a platform designed for abortion clinics to find vetted, pro-choice local vendors. Clinic managers say it has the potential to save them tremendous time and effort, enable them to negotiate better prices, and ultimately can allow clinics to evolve and best serve patients, especially as policy puts the location of clinics in continued flux.
Duration
Scope
Research, outreach / recruitment, exploratory interviews, ideation, storyboarding, participatory research, prototyping, UX using behavioral psychology, partnership building
Primary research
Research
Key insights
Core takeaway
Abortion care providers juggle so much beyond the act of performing abortions — from maintaining clinics, to training volunteers, to navigating the medical field — and each of these responsibilities is made more difficult due to abortion stigma. Even something like finding a plumber for their facilities can be an inordinately challenging task.
We surveyed 270 abortion healthcare providers (AHPs) and ran in-depth interviews with eight to learn more about key pain points and existing resources.
Outreach: To find research participants, we cold emailed clinics across the nation to limited success. Safety and security is a concern in the abortion care field, and proper vetting of outsiders like ourselves is understandably important. After connecting and building trust with a subject matter expert in the field, they offered to share our screener/survey with their network, and our participant pool grew. Relationship building along the way extended our reach.
Criteria: As we screened participants, we heard that clinic administrators may face more of the brunt of stigma and be even less studied than other clinical providers, given they have less prestige. So, we made sure to speak with people involved in an administrative capacity as well as those with clinical experience. We also prioritized speaking with a diverse group of people in red, blue, and swing states. And, we were interested in speaking both with people currently working in abortion care but also with those no longer working in the space, to understand why.
Of the 270 abortion healthcare providers that we surveyed:
81% have experienced perceived stigma (fear of: rejection, loss of friendship or relationships, criticism, isolation)
68% have experienced experienced stigma (experience of: discrimination, harassment, aggression)
33% have experienced internalized stigma (materialization of: guilt, shame, anxiety)
6% have not experienced abortion-related stigma
We developed our survey question from a description of stigma in the 2018 Reproductive Health journal article: “‘It’s something that marks you’: Abortion stigma after decriminalization in Uruguay” (link)
Evaluative Research
Decision guide
We next met with four providers in different contexts to learn what elements of our three concepts worked, what didn’t, and to iterate on our solutions.
Sample Structure:
Build rapport through introductions
Share context to our research and pause to validate our learnings thus far
Workshop each concept:
see how the opportunity area resonates
walk through the storyboard
solicit overall feedback and gut reactions
gather detailed feedback for each step in an idea’s process
run exercises like “build it, break it, fix it”
From these interviews, we:
validated: (A) the challenge of finding local vendors (B) interest in volunteer and student involvement made easier through onboarding support.
learned: (A) specific details for what should go into the vetting process (B) who the right partners are (C) when volunteer efforts are impactful (D) what elements of a review would most benefit providers and be easy to fill out (E) what safety concerns exist digitally for clinics.
pivoted: away from the “Family Dinner Event Series,” given substantial safety concerns that require extensive iteration on the idea.
newly considered: combining the “Student Rolodex Initiative” and “Provider-to-Provider Platform.”
and prioritized: staying inclusive of scenarios where clinics are most isolated or stigmatized.
