The abortion industry is struggling to reconcile its existence with truths about the procedure that even its members find difficult to deny.
From Townhall Magazine's EXCLUSIVE January feature, "A Dying Practice":
Imagine a young medical doctor. As an undergraduate, she completed a demanding series of prerequisite courses in subjects like biology, physics and chemistry.
After graduation and months of intense independent study, she took and passed the MCAT standardized test and became one of a minority of applicants accepted into medical school. Then she embarked on four grueling years of med school, alternating between long lectures on topics such as human embryology and clinical rotations through various specialties, including pediatrics, internal medicine and surgery.
Four years and $150,000 in student-loan debt later, she became a proud doctor of medicine, ready to heal the world one patient at
a time.
Next came her choice of a residency program. She felt called to obstetrics and gynecology—four more years of rigorous, supervised training in the two surgical-medical specialties related to the female reproductive organs.
Now she faces her most important decision: which subspecialty to pursue. She has many options, including maternal-fetal medicine, which would allow her to assist women with high-risk pregnancies and perform innovative fetal surgeries.
Then she learns about another option: pregnancy termination. She considers herself “pro-choice” but wonders, having toiled so hard for so long, whether she wants to give up so much to be directly and exclusively involved in the taking of human life. What
will she do?
The odds are, she will eschew abortion provision.
In recent years, there have been sharp declines in both the number of medical students training to perform abortions and the number of doctors performing abortions in their practices.
An August 2011 article in Obstetrics and Gynecology reported on a survey of more than 1,000 practicing OB/GYNs (the specialty
from which most abortionists are drawn). It found that while 97 percent said they had encountered women seeking abortions, only
14 percent were willing to perform them. The situation is especially acute for late-term abortionists. A 2008 report in the journal Contraception found that less than onethird of physicians performing second-trimester abortions were under the age of 50.
The result is an abortion industry in crisis. A comprehensive 2005 study found that 69 percent of metropolitan counties in the United States and 97 percent of non-metropolitan counties had no abortion provider. The American College of Obstetricians and
Gynecologists has stated that “the availability of abortion services is in jeopardy.”
......
Dr. Joe DeCook, director of operations for the American Association of Pro Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, explains in an e-mail to Townhall, “Nearly all doctors go into medicine because they want to cure patients of disease, and they want to be part of a life-saving process.”
“Abortion,” he writes, “is not practicing medicine. It’s as simple as that.”
Read more of Daniel Allot's anaylsis in the January issue of Townhall Magazine, including:
- -- how even the medical community is uncomfortable with abortionists
- -- techonology that's prompted the decline of abortion doctors
Order Townhall Magazine today to read the full report in the January issue.