Identifying barriers to abortion access for people in prisons in Australia

Women are the fastest growing prison population in both Canada and Australia. This heightens the need for gender-specific health care, including abortion care, for incarcerated individuals. In order to identify barriers to accessing abortion in prisons in Canada, I previously co-created an inventory of the facilities in Canada designated to incarcerate women and calculated the distance to known hospitals and free standing clinics providing procedural abortion services, and co-led an environmental scan of policy governing access to abortion in prisons. These analyses identified significant geographical and policy-related barriers to abortion access.
This project will apply these methods of identifying barriers to abortion access in prisons to the Australian context, creating an inventory of all facilities in Australia designated to incarcerate women and calculating distances to procedural abortion services, and validating the inventory and analysis by conducting interviews with key stakeholders in correctional women’s health in Australia. This project will also critically compare and contrast Australian and Canadian findings in order to identify key factors that may be differentially influencing abortion access. This project will benefit the partner institution by generating evidence on existing barriers to abortion access in prisons in Australia, which can inform future qualitative and quantitative research.

Faculty Supervisor:

Martha Paynter

Student:

Partner:

University of Sydney

Discipline:

Sociology

Sector:

Education

University:

University of New Brunswick

Program: