Measuring Abortion with the Anonymous Third Party Resporting Method

The goal of the ATPR method is to collect quantitative data on induced abortion in countries where access to abortion services is highly restricted and the practice is clandestine. The method yields data on the incidence of abortion, the social and demographic characteristics of women who resort to abortion (age, educational level, employment, parity, marital status, residence, etc.), and the characteristics of the procedures they obtain (who provides them, the abortion technique used, the rate of postabortion complications and care, etc.). In other words, the method allows us to “collect” abortion statistics in countries where the practice is illegal.* It also produces information on the profile of women who receive postabortion care in hospitals and on the “multiplier,” or proportion of all abortions that hospitalized cases represent, which postabortion cases need to be inflated by to obtain the total number of abortions.