The Fed

Gynecologists Are Pussies

Abortion Doctors are Runnin Scared, Leavin Their Services in Short Supply

Anna Chodos

The debate on abortion can be stupid and stupefying. No one wants to deal with the inescapable blue-in-the-face energy needed to make one's point when you could use those calories to order take-out. However, I tend to discount the interminable quality of the debate and assume that abortion is cozily safe in the legal status it enjoys.

This assumption lead me to experience unsightly pro-choice goosebumps this summer. My job lead me to be at clinics three times a week, and I perceived a threat to the availability of abortion that I had never considered: the lack of health care providers willing to perform the procedure.

The shortage of providers has developed for a few reasons. Some doctors opt not to perform abortions because they worry they put their lives and the lives of their families at risk, and some doctors are not comfortable performing them for religious reasons. Fair enough, but the resulting decrease in providers is acerbated by many current providers being of retiring age and fewer rising OB/GYN's being trained to perform abortions than twenty years ago.

Abortions are not even an integral part of many OB/GYN residency programs in the country. In fact, only 12% of these programs require training in 1st trimester procedures, although 58% have training on an optional basis. Huh? Abortions are the most commonly sought surgical procedure among U.S. women. This is not reflected in the facts: abortions are unavailable in 86% of U.S. counties (home to 32% of women of reproductive age) and one out of every four women must travel more than fifty miles to procure abortion services.

I may be superobservant, but I should note that some doctors get that there's a problem, too. Organizations, like Medical Students for Choice, have sprouted to combat the fact that "one of the greatest obstacles to safe, legal abortion today is the absence of trained providers."

There's a good reason why many providers are old, tired and ready to retire: they were there for Roe v. Wade, and they have witnessed the reality of the before and after. They know the legality of abortion does not correlate with its incidence so much as it does with its safety. This might mean that many of the younger practitioners have less concern for such a fact or they are not aware of it. I might take a moment to make plain some things on abortion, in general. Legal and widely available abortions do not translate into a high rate of occurrence. In Western Europe, abortion rates are relatively low for developed nations, and abortion is permitted on broad grounds and made widely available.

The abortion rate depends instead on the rate of unwanted pregnancies, which in turn greatly depends on the availability and use of contraception. The U.S. has a pretty high rate of unwanted pregnancy (half of the six million pregnancies a year are unwanted) and abortion (23 per 1000 women of reproductive age) for a developed nation, testimony to American women's phobia of taking pills. And testimony to the difficulty of practicing effective contraception throughout the forty reproductive years of one's life.

It seems essential to the realization of safe, full medical care for women that abortion services be available from trained medical providers.

But the provider shortage looms imminent and ultimately, it just strikes me as odd that the very medical professionals standing guard on the front lines protecting women's health, those well paid sentries on the ramparts of the uterine wall, seer increasingly unconcerned with preserving a woman's right to a safe abortion.

All statistics lifted from the Ala Guttmacher Institute's website www.agi-usa.org

December 1, 1999