Safe Abortion Calculator Guttmacher Institute
Designing a multilingual, data-driven advocacy tool for Guttmacher Institute
The Safe Abortion Calculator gives advocates, policymakers, and program implementers a clearer way to understand the health and economic effects of expanding safe abortion care. Working with Guttmacher Institute, Aten designed and built an interactive application that turns a complex dataset into a focused, shareable experience built for decision makers across low- and middle-income countries.
The project needed to do more than present data. It had to support a multilingual audience, work well on slower networks, provide downloadable outputs for offline use, and remain easy to maintain as new data is published each year. Aten partnered with Guttmacher to shape the experience through user consultation, refine the information architecture, and deliver a flexible technical foundation for future updates.
Key Challenges
Guttmacher needed a tool that could help users explore how changes in the proportion of safe abortions affect postabortion care needs and cost savings without feeling like a generic calculator. The experience needed to be clear enough for quick advocacy use, but substantial enough to support policy conversations at national, regional, and global levels.
The team also needed to account for a few important constraints:
- country-specific inputs and outputs had to be easy to understand and quick to adjust;
- the application needed to support English, French, and Spanish;
- charts had to be easy to share and download;
- and the underlying data refresh process had to be reliable for annual updates without requiring a fragile manual workflow.
Because many users would access the tool in settings with limited bandwidth or on mobile devices, performance and accessibility were also core requirements rather than afterthoughts.
Research & Discovery
Aten began with project discovery and a user consultation process to better understand how advocates and decision makers would use a tool like this in practice. Those conversations helped clarify the most important inputs and outputs, including the need to keep the interaction focused on country selection and a single safe-abortion percentage control rather than overwhelming users with too many variables.
The research also surfaced a few important product decisions. Users wanted graphical outputs that made the case quickly. They also valued downloadable assets and data exports that could travel beyond the site itself, especially for presentations, reports, and low-connectivity contexts.
Just as important, the discovery phase confirmed that the tool should stand on its own while still fitting naturally into Guttmacher’s broader digital ecosystem. The calculator would live as a dedicated page on guttmacher.org, but it also needed to be referenceable from topic pages and other supporting content.
A Clear, Focused Experience
Aten designed the Safe Abortion Calculator around a simple flow: select a country, adjust the share of abortions that are considered safe, and immediately see how the outputs change. The interface emphasizes clarity and momentum, helping users move from input to insight without unnecessary friction.
The final experience presents the results through shareable charts that visualize estimated changes in postabortion care needs and cost savings. The interface also includes supporting explanations, country-specific resources, and contextual guidance so users can better understand what the numbers mean and how to communicate them.
To make the tool more useful for advocacy, Aten included downloadable alternatives to the live charts and data. Users can copy a link to a specific result state, download charts as images, export current calculator data as CSV, and download the full dataset for broader analysis. Those options make the calculator useful both as an interactive web tool and as a source of assets that can be reused in presentations and reports.
A Maintainable Technical Foundation
Behind the interface, Aten implemented the calculator as a custom Drupal module with a data-first architecture built for long-term maintainability. The application includes custom API endpoints for estimates, exchange rates, and downloadable data, along with screenshot export endpoints that support the chart downloads used on the front end.
To make future updates easier, Aten also built custom Drush commands for converting source CSV files into the structured dataset used by the application and for updating exchange-rate data on a scheduled basis. That workflow keeps the data refresh process predictable and reduces the amount of manual work required when Guttmacher publishes new estimates.
Aten documented the module thoroughly so future team members can understand how the data is organized, how translations are managed, and how updates should be handled. That documentation is intended to make annual refreshes straightforward and to reduce the risk of accidental breakage as the tool evolves.
Flexible, Shareable, and Ready to Grow
The Safe Abortion Calculator helps Guttmacher turn complex data into an advocacy tool that can be used quickly, shared widely, and maintained over time. By pairing a focused front-end experience with a flexible Drupal-based backend, Aten created a solution that supports multilingual users, downloadable outputs, and future data updates without sacrificing clarity or performance.
It is a good example of how a well-structured digital tool can help translate research into action: not by adding more noise, but by making the right information easier to see, understand, and use.