This is Bad News?

The NYTimes recently ran an article on "The New Abortion Providers."

It's an unintentionally satisfying read as it explains how the pro-life movement has effectively eroded the medical community's will to perform abortion.

In a 1992 survey of OB-GYNs, 59 percent of those age 65 and older said that they performed abortions, compared with 28 percent of those age 50 and younger. The National Abortion Federation started warning about “the graying of the abortion provider.” In the decade after Roe, the number of sites providing abortion across the country almost doubled from about 1,500 to more than 2,900, according to the Gutt­macher Institute. But by 2000 the number shrank back to about 1,800 — a decline of 37 percent from 1982.

The article, of course, couches such statistics in grim, dark, and depressing tones...and makes the rare, embattled abortionist seem like some kind of noble super-hero. It also makes sure to open with an anecdote about how a pro-life call to out abortionists lead to murders. It uses a heroic tone to describe a new wave of feminists medical practitioners who are reforming the medical community from within:

Its leaders have built residency programs and fellowships at university hospitals, with the hope that, eventually, more and more doctors will use their training to bring abortion into their practices. The bold idea at the heart of this effort is to integrate abortion so that it’s a seamless part of health care for women — embraced rather than shunned.

Such a bright new dawn they forecast...

So, you see, the accidental optimism caused early in the article is quickly crushed under the promise of a resurgence in an abortive ideology.

And there's this gem of a paragraph:

By taking jobs on university faculties, the young doctors avoid walking to work through a scrum of screaming demonstrators. “Some people like to live on the edge — I don’t,” said Emily Godfrey, a 40-year-old doctor who practices at a primary-care clinic at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she also does abortions. “I’m a Catholic girl from the suburbs. I’m a yoga student. I like calm and serenity.”

A Catholic girl from the suburbs by day, and covert abortionist at your local university by night. She likes calm and serenity. You know who else likes calm and serenity? People who live in wombs.

And the rest of the article is as painful to read as you could expect. Abortionists talk about how they have to just get over the emotional conflicts they have and how they are making great strides incorporating abortion into medical school curricula.

It's a thoroughly unpleasant read, but I suppose it is also necessary to know what these people are up to.