Creative Minority Reports points to this article in response to the decline of the number of abortion doctors.
Address the shortage of abortion providers. We all know the drill: the average age of an abortion provider in this country is soaring upwards, and many doctors who deserve to retire and spend their days playing golf stay in the business because there’s so many women who need abortions and so few people to provide them. Few counties have abortion providers, and many women have to travel hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles to get one. And it’s because younger doctors don’t want to perform abortions. They don’t have any memories of the horrors of septic abortions (unlike many older doctors), and the harassment they face if they join up seems like too much trouble.
The problem is complex, but not unfixable. We should lobby for stronger protections for abortion clinic workers, so that fear doesn’t drive would-be providers away. More importantly, we need to find a way to get people with the right attitudes and the right skills into the business. Programs encouraging bright, young pro-choice people into medical school to train as ob-gyns who perform abortions is a good start. Pushing medical schools not only to teach the procedures for abortion, but also to highlight the dangers of self-abortion would also help. Perhaps a scholarship program for medical students who train to be abortion providers, or a debt forgiveness program for those doctors that provide abortion? There are endless possibilities, and we should undertake them.
Amazing they always pull out the canard about people not becoming abortionists because of security risks. Funny how people become policemen, fire fighters, and soldiers and yet they can’t find doctors to brave the so-called risk. As tragic as the extremely rare murder of abortionist has been, it is still extremely rare.
No mention is made about those abortionist who stop being abortionists or the group that helps them the Society of Centurions.
I guess it is just hard finding people who are idealistic enough to spend years in training in order to kill and not to save life. Thank God there is still a stigma on this profession and that the “best and brightest” are not drawn toward this anti-vocation. No kid grows up wanting to be an abortionist – though plenty want to be doctors.
You all want to wonder at someone who sees the “horror” of septic abortions and not the “horror” of successful abortions. The problem is not septic abortions, but women choosing abortion in the first place. Their misguided attempt at the cure of a pregnancy does not mean we should have doctors to provide it. Besides the statistics for so-called back alley abortions was made up out of whole cloth by former abortionist and founder of NARAL Bernard Nathanson who is now Catholic. Women seeking abortions when abortion is illegal is tragic. But the tragedy is them seeking an abortion in the first place.
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Idealistic young medical students get one look at an ultrasound of an eight-week old infant in the womb, and that’s often enough to turn them off to the whole idea of doing abortions. They may still argue that the “right” to abortion is necessary – in theory – but they themselves want nothing to do with performing this gruesome procedure. Observing or assisting at an actual abortion is like watching something from a horror movie – reassembling and accounting for baby body parts on an exam table to make sure the doctor got “it” all is necessary because if anything remains behind and festers inside the mother’s body, it could cause an infection. What young student in his or her right mind would want anything to do with so horrific and barbaric a practice – even apart from the moral and ethical problems it presents?
No, the doctors who specialize in abortion are the lowest of the low, the worst of the worst, the bottom of the barrel. They are in it solely for the money. They are the ones who could barely get into medical school, the ones who barely graduated, and the ones least esteemed among their colleagues. As the costs of a medical education have increased, and the prospective net income from a career in medicine has dwindled somewhat (due to increasing oversight from managed care and the massive costs of processing insurance fees, etc.), students interested in simply making a ton of money will less likely choose the medical profession. Instead, idealistic young students who actually care about helping people’s lives are going to be the ones going into medicine, and they are not going to be that attracted to a specialty whose principle work consists of poisoning, carving up, and siphoning out pieces of unborn infants from their mothers’ wombs.
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Now if the young, best and brightest stop calling the little one with its own DNA a “fertilized egg” when they are prescribing the IUD.
Good point about there still being plenty of people willing to take on other high-risk occupations.
You can say anything you want, it doesn’t make it true. I’ve worked at a local Planned Parenthood clinic, off and on, for 20+ years as a volunteer and staff member.
A lot of the people there are volunteers and interns who are either unpaid or on very small stipends. Paid staff members are few and mostly have other full time jobs to secure needed benefits and pay the bills. Clinicians are mostly Nurse Practitioners, not doctors.
99% of the work done there is prenatal care and nutritional supplement, contraception, STD screening and treatment, PAP smears, and indigent health services, completely unrelated to abortion. Abortion referrals are only on request and all other options are explored and resources made available. No fees are ever charged. Donations are gratefully accepted.