I’m reading parts of “Dispelling the Myths of Abortion History” (Amazon link here), stumbled across this, and thought I would share.

No wonder, then, with all the advances in reproductive medicine since 1818, that obstetricians (whether male or female) on the whole are more opposed to abortion of [sic] any other class of physicians.  Two-thirds of gynecologists refuse to do abortions…. Obstetrical nurses, if anything, are even more reluctant to doing abortions…. Jonathan Imber has gone so far as to describe the private practice of medicine as the principle barrier to a more equitable provision of abortion services.

(Internal citations omitted.)  There’s more: this refusal of OB-GYNs to abortion is nearly universal; even in countries where abortion has long been legal, they refuse to perform the service.  Apparently, even Soviet doctors, who worked in a society wherein abortion was completely condoned and even encouraged, had similar reactions. 

More on the pro-life/pro-choice disparity within medicine:

Psychiatrists, who are most removed from personal involvement with fetology and abortion, are the physicians who, in the aggregate, are most supportive of abortion rights.  Their support began in the early twentieth century.  Psychiatrists were disproportionately active compared to other physicians in campaigning for the reform or repeal of abortion laws in the 1960s and 1970s.  Endorsement of repeal by the Committee on Psychiatry and the Law was an important step in mobilizing pressure for abortion on demand.

(Internal citations omitted.) 

Some food for thought for pro-lifers: there is a dearth of good evidence about the psychiatric and psychological outcomes of women who have had abortions.  We do know that American women are twice as likely as American men to be depressed (here);  while that hardly proves that abortion is the cause of the disparity, or even one cause thereof, it eliminates the possibility of immediately disproving adverse psychological sequelae from abortion. 

Second course: pro-abortion rhetoric includes such lines as “making abortion available,” or complaints about pro-lifers “shutting down abortion facilities,” or about how horrible it is that women only have one abortion provider in the entire state.  If women can’t get abortions, it’s because those closest to the medical procedure - OB-GYNs - don’t want to do them.  Let’s re-focus the rhetoric on why the number of abortion mills is decreasing.

Dessert: Roe was predicated on the privacy that exists between a woman and her physician.  (Of course, Casey and subsequent rulings have abandoned this rationale in favour of abortion on demand, but that’s a different issue.)  If physicians believe that this procedure is barbaric and unfit for modern medical practise, should that not carry greater weight in the abortion debate than those who are further removed from the realities of the procedure?

Thoughts?