The New York Magazine has an article that talks about how the healthcare profession is trying to make abortion more mainstream. They want to move abortion away from the secrecy of clinics and towards hospitals or family practices.
For years, medical school programs offered no mention of abortion healthcare in courses offered. This is slowly beginning to change, and as a new generation of doctors are graduating it looks like they may be able to move the procedure from the red-headed stepchild of medicine to being respected.
In the first generation after Roe, abortion providers were mostly men because doctors were mostly men. Since then, women have streamed into the ranks of OB-GYN and family medicine. They are now the main force behind providing abortion.
THE PROVIDERS THAT make up the new vanguard don’t define themselves as “abortion doctors.” They often try to make the procedure part of their broader medical practice — by spending much of their week seeing patients for general gynecology or primary-care visits, and by being on call on the labor and delivery floor. If the young doctors succeed at making abortion mainstream and respected within medicine, abortion could move from clinics to doctor’s offices and hospitals. And if that happened, would the politics surrounding it finally change? Would protesters stand outside a hospital or a primary-care clinic or a group practice that treats all kinds of patients?
That’s an interesting question. I think it wouldn’t make much of a difference right now. Over time, it’s possible that Christian and other religious views towards abortion would become more lenient, but I just can’t see abortion suddenly becoming acceptable simply because the location of the procedure has changed.
The article is long, but worth reading. It’s eye-opening about how abortion providers feel and why they choose to do what they do.
