Legal and Ethical Issues in Evaluating Abortion Services
krisf...@gmail.com
L. E. Ferris c Department of Public Health Sciences, Faculty of
Medicine, University of Toronto, Institute for Clinical Evaluative
Sciences, 2075 Bayview Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4N 3M5; Tel:
(416) 480-4055; Fax: (416) 480-6048; E-mail: l...@ices.on.ca.
American Journal of Evaluation, Vol. 21, No. 3, 2000, pp. 329-340. All
rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISSN: 1098-2140
Copyright © 2001 by American Evaluation Association.
When evaluation studies are conducted in a sensitive area, ethical and
legal implications are
bound to challenge evaluators. All too often, evaluators must deal
with competing responsibilities
in evaluating these programs or services. This article focuses on
several ethical and legal
issues that arose during an evaluation of abortion services. We
discuss how we developed
decision rules and considered trade-offs in dealing with these ethical
and legal issues so that
rational and objective decisions could be reached. We place this
discussion within the context of
balancing the utility and propriety evaluation standards with respect
to obtaining true informed
consent and protecting the privacy and confidentiality of data when
evaluating abortion services.
The article concludes with recommendations concerning the evaluation
of abortion services.
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Lorraine Ferris was commissioned by the Ontario Ministry of Health
(Canada) to conduct four
evaluation studies on how abortion services were delivered in the
province. (Some of the
findings have been published-see Ferris & McMain-Klein, 1995; Ferris,
McMain-Klein,
Colodny, Fellows, & Lamont, 1996; Ferris, McMain-Klein, & Iron, 1997,
1998.)