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Objective: To describe the community context of women who travel to access Mexico City's public sector abortion programme and identify factors associated with travelling from highly marginalised settings., Methods: We used data from the Interrupción Legal de Embarazo (ILE) programme (2016-2019) and identified all abortion clients who travelled from outside Mexico City. We merged in contextual information at the municipality level and used descriptive statistics to describe ILE clients' individual characteristics and municipalities on several measures of vulnerability. We also compared municipalities that ILE clients travelled from with those where no one travelled from. We used logistic regression to identify factors associated with travelling to access ILE services from highly marginalised versus less marginalised municipalities., Results: Our sample included 21 629 ILE clients who travelled to Mexico City from 491 municipalities within all 31 states outside Mexico City. The majority of clients travelled from the least marginalised (81.9%) and most populated (over 100 000 inhabitants; 91.3%) municipalities. Most (91.2%) ILE clients came from municipalities with adolescent fertility rates in the bottom three quintiles. Clients with a primary or secondary education (vs high school or more) and those from a municipality with a high adolescent fertility rate (top two quintiles) had higher odds of travelling from a highly marginalised (vs less) municipality (adjusted odds ratio (aOR) 1.46, 95% CI 1.35 to 1.58 and aOR 1.89, 95% CI 1.68 to 2.12, respectively)., Conclusion: ILE clients travel from geographically and socioeconomically diverse communities. There is an unmet need for legal abortion across Mexico., Competing Interests: Competing interests: BGD receives research support from Merck., (© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2022. Re-use permitted under CC BY-NC. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.)

Objectives: In the Mexico City Metropolitan Area, only women in the city center have local access to legal first-trimester abortion. We quantify how this legislative discrepancy affects access to legal, public-sector abortion across the metropolitan area., Study Design: In this observational study, we used a dataset representing 67.2% of all abortions occurring between 2010 and 2012 in Mexico City's public abortion program and census population data. We calculate utilization rates for 75 municipalities in the metropolitan area for 2010-2012. We compare utilization between municipalities with and without local legal access, adjusting for differences in sociodemographic drivers of abortion demand. We explore the effects of local abortion legality, travel time and socioeconomic status (SES)., Results: Women who had to travel into the city center for legal abortions used services at only 18.6% (95% CI 13.3%-33.0%) of the expected rate if they had local access, adjusting for sociodemographic factors. After controlling for travel time and SES, women who lived where abortion is illegal had a 58.6% (95% CI 21.5%-78.1%) reduction in access, and each additional 15 min of travel further reduced access by 33.7% (95% CI 18.2%-46.3%). Women who travel to seek legal abortions are more likely to have completed secondary education compared to other reproductive age women in their municipality (p = <.00001)., Conclusions: We find that, in the Mexico City Metropolitan Area, both living where abortion is illegal and having to travel further to access services substantially reduce access to legal, public-sector abortion. These burdens disproportionately affect women of lower SES., Implications: Both local legality and proximate access are key to ensuring equity in access to public-sector abortion. Legalization of abortion services across the greater Mexico City Metropolitan Area has the potential to increase equity in utilization and meet unmet demand for legal abortion., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)