Beyond Legal Access: Reimagining Abortion Navigation in Canada
Over the past several months, Vitala Global has had the opportunity to explore the role Aya Contigo could play as a solution for improved access and navigation of sexual and reproductive healthcare in Canada.This journey began with the invaluable support of Canadian philanthropists and reproductive health researchers, providers and advocates. We have received the trust, encouragement and financial support to explore where Aya Contigo could meaningfully contribute to bridging the gap in the current landscape of abortion navigation, information, accompaniment and care.
For Vitala Global, this has been more than expanding Aya Contigo into a new context. Our organizational roots are in Canada: as a Canadian-registered tech not-for-profit, this work represents an opportunity to invest our experience, technology and care model within the context Vitala itself calls home.
It is also a context our co-founder and CEO, Dr. Roopan Gill, knows firsthand. A practicing OBGYN, Associate Professor and Clinician Investigator at the University of Toronto, Roopan has worked throughout her career within Canada’s reproductive healthcare system, including as a clinical abortion provider at Women’s College Hospital and Mount Sinai in Toronto. Her experience has given her a close view of the gaps that can persist even where abortion is legal—from barriers faced by immigrants and people of colour to the stigma that can make reproductive healthcare difficult to navigate and talk about.
That firsthand experience is one of the reasons Canada matters to us: it gives Vitala an opportunity to bring what we have learned building Aya Contigo in other contexts back to the ecosystem where our organization began.
Why Canada — and why now?
Our analysis and adaptation process in Canada has been guided by a rigorous research methodology, helping us understand both: opportunities and persistent gaps within the reproductive health landscape, and, importantly, where Aya Contigo is best positioned to bring meaningful added value to access, navigation and care.
Our research showed that Canada occupies a distinctive position in the global abortion landscape. While abortion is decriminalized, and the country has a publicly funded healthcare system, our research surfaced an important reality: legal access to abortion does not necessarily mean timely and high quality abortion care.
In our Context Analysis, we reported that access varies considerably depending on where individuals live, their residency status, gestational age, the providers and pharmacies available in their community, and their ability to navigate a healthcare system administered differently across provinces and territories. This environment is further complicated by growing misinformation and disinformation being circulated across popular social media sites, and in some cases, AI search platforms.
The picture is not of one uniform abortion system, but many different pathways to care. In some contexts, medication abortion can be timely, local and human-centred. In others, the careseeker carries much of the burden of figuring out where to go, who provides care, whether a pharmacy stocks medication and what happens next.
We also analyzed the unique position of Canada in respect to the broader North American context and the latest threats to reproductive rights’ legal context. As abortion restrictions and uncertainty in the United States continue to reshape the regional reproductive health landscape, Canada has an important opportunity to position itself as a leading country for accessible, human-centred abortion care, while strengthening the solutions to gaps, inequities and risks that exist within its own system.
That is the context Vitala aims to contribute to.
We started by listening
Our approach to adapting Aya Contigo begins by understanding the Canadian abortion ecosystem from the perspectives of both those delivering care and those navigating it.
To build knowledge of the context, our team carried out a research process that involved desk research, abortion data across provinces, stakeholder and ecosystem mapping, interviews with healthcare providers and system leaders, user research, service design and product prototyping.
Our partnership with Action Canada for Sexual and Reproductive Health (Action Canada) has been pivotal throughout this process. Joining forces with an organization deeply rooted in supporting people and advancing sexual and reproductive health and rights across Canada has allowed us to ground Aya Contigo’s adaptation in local expertise, trusted relationships and the realities of people navigating care. Their team has supported our understanding of the Canadian context, stakeholder mapping and introductions, participated in interviews, helped shape the contextual analysis and supported recruitment for our user research.
Together with Action Canada for Sexual Health and Rights, we developed a contextual analysis of medication abortion care. The research included interviews with healthcare providers, system leaders and experts, alongside reviews of clinical guidance, policy frameworks and existing models of care. Vitala and Action Canada worked together throughout the process to synthesize and validate our findings.
But understanding the health system was only one part of the process. We also needed to hear directly from people who had experienced medication abortion in Canada.
Vitala therefore conducted in-depth interviews with people who had medication abortions in Canada, exploring their journeys from pregnancy recognition and decision-making through finding care, having an abortion and accessing support afterwards. Participants also tested an early Canada-adapted Aya Contigo prototype and shared feedback directly with our team.
This allowed us to shift our research question from “Can Aya work in Canada?” to “How can Aya Contigo evolve to deliver meaningful support to careseekers in Canada? ”.
What we learned about abortion access in Canada
One of our clearest findings was that the challenge in Canada is less about whether abortion exists and more about whether people can find, understand and navigate their way to it.
Our contextual analysis surfaced key challenges to navigational experiences: fragmented referral pathways, providers who may offer medication abortion but do not publicly advertise it, inconsistent pharmacy participation, misinformation and a lack of clear public-facing entry points into care.
Medication abortion is available across Canada, but can involve multiple touchpoints to access it in practice. Geography compounds these challenges. Rural and remote communities may have fewer providers and pharmacies, while language, cultural and religious barriers can make available information feel inaccessible or inappropriate without direct support and translation. Uninsured, migrant and refugee communities can face additional financial and administrative barriers, while Indigenous, Black, racialized and disabled people may encounter discrimination, medical mistrust and other structural obstacles.
Our user research brought another dimension into focus: access to abortion in Canada is an emotional experience.
Participants consistently wanted reassurance, empathy, privacy and non-judgmental support. The research identified significant differences in experience across racial and cultural backgrounds, with racialized participants more frequently describing difficulties navigating information online, the healthcare system, negative provider interactions, fear of stigma, histories of mistrust and a lack of culturally appropriate care.
People were also piecing together their own information ecosystems, moving between Google and healthcare websites for medical information, social media, and online communities for personal stories, and increasingly AI tools for decision-making support, because they could not find everything they needed in one trusted place or did not trust a single source.
Technology was already part of their journey. Most participants interviewed had used AI as an early source of health information, decision-making support and processing, while still wanting human reassurance during the most emotional and physically challenging moments of their abortion experience.
This research helped us validate the model at the heart of Aya Contigo: technology is not here to replace human care; it is here to enable trusted, human-centred care that is easier to reach and to bridge gaps in existing, often fragmented healthcare systems.
We were enthusiastic to observe that when participants tested Aya, they responded particularly positively to its privacy and anonymity, conversational model, emotional tone and ability to bring information together. They described the experience as warm, discreet and less intimidating than navigating traditional healthcare systems or searching for information alone.
Those insights are now directly informing how Aya is being adapted: from pregnancy-recognition guidance and clearer navigation pathways to culturally responsive resources, lived experiences, myth-busting information, self-care tools and stronger connections between digital and human support.
What comes next: Aya Contigo Canada
These months of research, partnership-building, user interviews, service design and internal product development have brought us to our next phase.
We are preparing to activate Aya Contigo in Canada, with a planned launch in October 2026.
Our research has guided us towards developing a stakeholder map spanning clinical and research experts, abortion providers, community health organizations, and policy and advocacy actors. This mapping is helping us identify not only potential implementation partners, but the relationships we need to build so that Aya becomes part of Canada's existing reproductive health ecosystem.
Our initial strategy will test how Aya can complement existing services: acting as a digital entry point for navigation and accompaniment, providing continuity and after-care support, and helping people overcome geographic, informational, cultural and identity-related barriers to accessing care earlier. What we learn will ultimately inform a broader strategy for scaling Aya across provinces.
We are leading with the awareness that Canada has created an important enabling environment for abortion care. Our ambition is to work alongside the providers and organizations already sustaining that ecosystem to complement their care by supporting a more connected, more equitable and more human abortion journey.
If you want to stay informed about the upcoming launch in October, sign up for our Canada Community Mailing List and be the first to know more about how to access Aya Contigo in Canada:
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