Abstract
STUDY OBJECTIVE: Even before the Dobbs Supreme Court decision, minors experienced a wide variety of barriers to abortion care in the United States, including legal, financial, cultural, transportation, and misinformation barriers as well as pressure from parents and partners. This scoping review summarizes the literature on barriers to abortion among minors in the United States prior to the Dobbs decision. METHODS: We conducted a database search to identify original research in the United States published between 2007 and 2022. We included quantitative and qualitative empirical articles and assessed their quality. We created categories for the barriers to abortion among minors identified in the articles. We screened 7584 records and included 70 articles in the scoping review. We charted study aims, study designs, data sources, analytic samples, and results. RESULTS: The articles explored factors related to abortion access and identified several categories of barriers to abortion among minors. These included legal barriers (41 articles found them to be a barrier), financial barriers (14 articles), cultural barriers (13 articles), transportation barriers (12 articles), pressure from parents (11 articles), misinformation (8 articles), and pressure from a partner (8 articles). Legal barriers, including laws that require minors to inform or get permission from an adult guardian, were the most commonly identified barrier. CONCLUSION: These findings suggest that minors need policy and interpersonal support to overcome general and age-specific barriers to abortion care. Future research should examine if and how barriers for minors have intensified post-Dobbs, informing targeted policy responses.