2025 British Society of Abortion Care Providers (BSACP) Annual Conference

Description

Poster Presentation at 2025 BSACP Conference
Applying analysis of post-abortion contraception to practice: Reflecting on implications for care
Background: Our recent critical review of UK post-abortion contraception literature, using Bacchi’s What’s the Problem Represented to Be? (WPR) approach, identified six dominant and sometimes conflicting “problem representations.” These were existing abortion rates and repeat abortion, risky groups, meeting service users’ needs, organisational capacity, knowledge of contraceptive methods and abortion stigma. The dominant framing positioned abortion rates as the central “problem,” with abortion frequently represented as a consequence of individual contraceptive failure. Our findings have implications for practice and service delivery.
Methods: We focus on a practice-oriented application of the findings from our review, considering how the identified problem representations could be applied to and influence post-abortion contraceptive provision. We discuss potential implications for clinical encounters, service design and organisational priorities, with particular attention to the ‘risk’ of stigmatising social processes and the principles of person-centred and reproductive justice-informed care.
Results: Problem representations that frame abortion primarily as a failure of contraception risk reinforcing stigma and directing care towards behavioural “correction” rather than meeting service users’ diverse needs. Conceptual slippages between “unplanned,” “unintended,” and “unwanted” pregnancy create challenges for communication, data interpretation, and care planning. Service evaluations that privilege repeat abortion rates as a marker of quality risk obscuring wider priorities such as accessibility, choice, satisfaction and wider inequalities. At the organisational level, capacity and resource constraints interact with these framings to shape care delivery in ways that may limit person-centred care
Conclusion: Applying WPR-informed findings to practice highlights the need to critically reflect on the language used and normative assumptions made within abortion and contraceptive care. Clinicians, services and policymakers should acknowledge the diverse and nuanced reasons for and experiences of abortion that go beyond "individualised failure" framings to help support care that is non-stigmatising and aligned with principles of reproductive justice.

Period	3 Oct 2025
Event type	Conference
Location	London, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	National