PONE-D-20-01114

The microeconomics of abortion: A scoping review and analysis of the economic consequences for abortion care-seekers

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Coast,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

I acknowledge that Reviewer 2's suggestions are likely to be beyond the scope of this paper. However, Reviewer 1 has provided a thorough review and raised a number of pertinent points in the attached document that need to be addressed.

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Hannah E Carter

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: N/A

Reviewer #2: No

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: Please see attached word document for the full details of my comments and the breakdown associated with my completed review. I recommend Major Revision

Many Thanks

Reviewer #2: I appreciate your study of the literature on abortion, which is helpful to the extent that we can understand better what has been done. At the same time, it would be desirable to conduct an independent research, based on your own research design, in order to quantitatively find out what makes abortion difficult.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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PONE-D-20-01114R1

The microeconomics of abortion: A scoping review and analysis of the economic consequences for abortion care-seekers

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Coast,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Apr 17 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Hannah E Carter

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: N/A

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The authors have significantly improved the paper; I’m very glad that they incorporated the suggested edits I had made in my first review. All line numbers below are from the clean transcript.

I do still find some of the evidence presented a bit thin, e.g. lines 292-294 & lines 400-402, by which I mean one reads the text and still walks away not understanding the what the results are of the included articles.

I will stand by what I said in the first review, that there’s too much in this one manuscript, and I would specifically remove (or seriously winnow) the section on “benefits or values” as a lot of the information described there does not fall into the economic sphere, including relationship issues, stigma, and identity maintenance. If the authors insist on keeping this in the paper, they should make the link between these topics and microeconomics much clearer.

I think this conclusion is very important: “Although relatively few micro-level studies are defined explicitly by their authors or their methodology as “economic” studies, our review shows that there is a wealth of economically relevant information that can be gleaned from the evidence base.” I also find valuable their specification in research gaps presented in the Discussion.

Minor points:

They are still overusing the en-dash on pg. 2 and 12, and they’re still mixing hyphens with en-dashes (lines 80-81, line 190, line 275, line 308, lines 331-332, lines 481-482, lines 491-492).

Line 102: “(PRISMA)” acronym not necessary because it appears on line 103.

Line 136: why “simultaneously”?

Lines 156-159: Another reason for the dominance of studies from the USA is the languages the authors used in which to conduct their search.

Line 170: “three-quarters”

Line 173: Still hard to know what is meant by “abortion care-seeker status”—this is a term that the author team is clearly comfortable with but which is not intuitive to the reader. How about, “Study populations were most often whoever was seeking an abortion.” (I don’t even think they need the text “rather than…”)

Line 217: “the” missing before “pregnancy outcome.”

Lines 257-258: Stating that the collection of non-financial measures are important is a recommendation, and not a result, and should be moved to the Discussion.

Line 270: insert “any” before “induced abortion”

Line 274: the word “intersection” is not the right word here; replace with “relationship between”?

Line 283: the word “interactions” is not the right word here.

Line 287: what is “an advocacy service”?

Lines 299-230: “women reported various reasons for not using surgical abortion services…because of the cost”?

Lines 306-307: “Younger ages may mean higher costs charged for abortion-related services”—this is unnecessarily obtuse.

Line 335: Not sure that the word “interventions” is the correct one here; it sounds as though the section would be talking about things like “The Justice Fund” in the USA which was a time-delimited experiment which paid for period for women’s abortions. How about “Social support” or “Charitable accommodations”?

Line 361: It’s not the fact that there are a limited number of studies which demonstrates the power of prospective research designs, but rather “There are a limited number of studies which use a prospective design; they demonstrate the potential power to understand how the overall costs…”

Line 372 and the rest of the paragraph, and the paragraph which follows about TRAP laws: although it is possible to cross-reference, the authors should specify in the text geographically where the evidence is coming from.

Line 394: “prescriptions” for medication abortion? “medication” �medication abortion?

Lines 400-402: the references are not formatted properly, and there’s a gratuitous period and space after [100]

Line 450: “in” should be “on”

Line 501-502: That text belongs at the beginning of the section.

Line 539: Indent missing.

Reviewer #2: The revised version appears to take into account the comments, so I have no other comments at this time.

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

The microeconomics of abortion: A scoping review and analysis of the economic consequences for abortion care-seekers

PONE-D-20-01114R2

Dear Dr. Coast,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

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Kind regards,

Hannah E Carter

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments: