UPDATE: Alberta abortion statistics for 2015/2016 to 2018/2019

UPDATE March 4, 2020 Claim codes for Alberta.

UPDATE March 3, 2020
My question to AHS regarding their statistics, and their response: 
Q. Can you explain why your stats are consistently lower than those stats reported by CIHI?
A. There are two reasons
1.       Difference in Data source (We use Claims and CIHI uses inpatient/outpatient data).
2.       Difference in methodology (We restrict any claims with 60 days as one abortion) but am not sure about CIHI (You can confirm with them).

I received abortion statistics from Alberta Health Services (AHS) through a freedom of information request. I then compared these numbers to CIHI's numbers. As you can see, AHS's numbers are less than CIHI's. This was a surprise since both Quebec and Ontario's numbers are higher than CIHI's.

But notice the footnotes.

From CIHI data:

"patients with coverage under Quebec’s health insurance plan receiving care in Alberta are reported by Alberta. However, patients with coverage under Alberta’s health insurance plan receiving care in Quebec are not reported (by either Quebec or Alberta)."

So abortions covered by AHS, but done in Quebec, aren't reported anywhere.

From Alberta data:

"Mifegymiso prescriptions were introduced in July 2017 which affected abortions numbers for the last two fiscal years."

So abortions covered by AHS do not include medical abortions, but only surgical abortions. This means that 2017/2018 and 2018/2019 numbers would be higher than reported--if only we knew how many medical abortions were occurring in Alberta.

Once again we have confusion over abortion statistics.