Stigma Reduction on Reproductive Health

Abstract

Women who seek abortion services face a myriad of barriers, stigma being one of the most
prominent. Stigma can consist of impersonal structural barriers such as laws and regulations, or it
can be as intimate as community beliefs and interpersonal reactions. These kinds of stigma can
cause emotional, financial, and psychological distress, and a feeling of isolation. To reduce
stigma, a web based interactive narrative was created as an abortion stigma reduction
intervention. Once created, a study was conducted to gather data on the feasibility of the
narrative. The aim of this paper is to analyze the feasibility of an abortion stigma based
interactive narrative. Participants (n=45) involved in this study were college students taking a
Public Health course, and a mixed methods survey was used to collect data after participants
played the interactive narrative. Students were surprised to learn about cost/finances, sixty-eight
percent felt that they learned a lot from the interactive narrative, and their main takeaway from
the narrative was that abortion stigma is more prevalent in nontraditional ways than was
originally thought. Based on the findings, the intervention was found to be promising and
feasible. The results gathered will be used for process evaluation to guide future improvements.