About the Options in Pregnancy Termination (OPT) Decision Aid

The Options in Pregnancy Termination (OPT) decision aid is a two-part resource consisting of a 12-minute video and accompanying printed aid. We created OPT after conducting research with women who had been diagnosed with serious pregnancy complications and had decided to end the pregnancy. The goal of our ongoing research is to understand women’s experiences and needs in order to better support their decision-making.

OPT was created specifically to describe two termination options and help women explore this decision in the context of their own preferences and values. The stories told in the OPT video are fictionalized versions of accounts by real women we interviewed in our research.

OPT was designed to encourage shared decision making between patients and providers, and to improve patient-centered care by introducing choice, describing options, and helping patients explore their preferences. OPT is grounded in the Ottawa framework and values clarification methods, including elements that (1) help to optimize patients’ mental representations of the options, (2) suspend selection of an initially favored option without considering all relevant information, (3) encourage the retrieval of relevant values, and (4) facilitate the weighing of options and their attributes.

OPT development was informed at every step by a stakeholder advisory group including patients, genetic counselors, a social worker, a psychologist, and maternal-fetal medicine and family planning subspecialists. OPT follows the International Patient Decision Aid Standards (IPDAS) criteria.