Editorial standards

Fact and analysis

Every substantive page carries one of two labels near its heading.

• Fact means the page reports what evidence and official sources say. Where evidence is contested or uncertain, the page says so.
• Analysis means the page explains how a system, legal record, dataset, or body of evidence works in practice. It identifies interpretation and limitations without arguing for a pregnancy outcome, party, candidate, law, or political result.

This publication does not run an opinion section. Political argument does not appear inside clinical pages or policy explanation.

The source hierarchy

Claims are supported in this order.

1. For United States medication claims: current Food and Drug Administration labelling, Medication Guides, and safety communications.
2. For global clinical context: current World Health Organization clinical guidance on abortion.
3. For United States obstetric and gynecologic patient guidance: current American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists material.
4. For descriptive United States surveillance: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports and their stated methods.
5. For cancer-risk claims: the National Cancer Institute.
6. Below those: other government health agencies, professional society guidance, and peer-reviewed systematic reviews whose methods have been read in full.
7. Below those, and for navigation only: reputable directories and organisations that route people to services.

Three rules follow from that list.

• An advocacy organisation is never the sole support for a clinical claim.
• A press article is never the sole support for a clinical or legal conclusion.
• A search result snippet is never evidence. Sources are read.

Every substantive page ends with a source list stating, for each source, what it supports on that page and what it cannot support. The source directory collects all of them in one place.

Original writing

Source paragraphs, tables, and artwork are not copied. Pages are written as original synthesis, and where a diagram would help, it is drawn rather than lifted. Reuse rights are checked before any external visual is adapted.

Meaningful limitations of a study or a dataset are stated where the claim is made, not hidden in a footnote. Where primary sources conflict, the conflict is described rather than resolved silently in favour of whichever source is more convenient.

How artificial intelligence is used

Stated plainly, because readers of health content are entitled to know.

• No page on this site is published as unreviewed machine output.
• No clinical claim originates from a language model. Claims come from the sources listed on the page.
• No patient story, quotation, testimonial, or example person on this site is generated. There are none at all, generated or otherwise.
• No medical illustration on this site is machine generated.
• Machine assistance may be used for drafting structure, checking consistency, and finding candidate sources. A person reads every source and is accountable for every published sentence.

Stories and consent

This site publishes no personal stories. If that ever changes, a story would appear only with the documented, informed, revocable consent of the person it belongs to, and it would be labelled as one person's experience rather than presented as typical.

Fabricated quotations, invented experiences, and stock imagery used to imply a real person are prohibited outright.

Conflicts of interest

• No payment, gift, hospitality, referral fee, or commission is accepted from any clinic, telehealth service, medication supplier, abortion fund, advocacy organisation, or political committee.
• No page is sponsored, and no placement is sold.
• Author and reviewer pages state their role, their conflicts, and how they are compensated.
• A reviewer who has a conflict on a topic does not review that topic.

Language rules

• Lead with the answer. Define specialist terms on first use.
• Use "medication abortion" and "procedural abortion" for the two categories. Do not call all abortion surgery.
• Distinguish curettage from vacuum aspiration, and explain that "D&C" is used inconsistently in public language.
• Use "dilation and evacuation" on first mention and "D&E" afterward.
• Treat "late-term abortion" as an imprecise political phrase rather than a clinical label.
• Do not present viability as one fixed universal week.
• Do not present gestational age and time since conception as interchangeable.
• Describe political positions in specific, attributed, parallel language. When quoting a person or organisation, use its chosen label. Otherwise avoid loaded or pejorative labels.
• Use explicit dates. Do not imply freshness from a rebuild.
• Do not use an em dash or an en dash.
• Do not use exclamation marks in safety or support copy.

Corrections

Substantive corrections are published with a date on the corrections page and in the change history of the affected page. Nothing substantive is changed silently. Typographical fixes that do not change meaning are not logged and do not move a page's update date.