The following was written by an Arizona doctor with more than
two decades of experience providing abortion care and other reproductive health
services. Arizona is one of the states with the highest number of abortion restrictions
in the country. The author has been targeted at home and work by anti-abortion
protesters and has chosen to remain anonymous in order to protect his family
from attacks and further harassment.
In the mid-1980s, I was a young doctor in residency in Detroit.
One day, a young woman was rushed into the hospital; she was 14 weeks pregnant and
severely bleeding. It was clear that if someone didn’t terminate
her pregnancy — fast — she was going to die. But, no doctor on hand had the training to perform an abortion. I stood
by, helpless, while her life began to slip away.
We finally tracked down a doctor who had been educated in China and had the training necessary to terminate a pregnancy. As I watched him
save the woman's life, I knew I wanted to develop those skills in case something like
that ever happened again. I didn’t become
an abortion provider because of a grand epiphany about women’s rights. I am not an activist, and I don’t approach my work with
missionary zeal. I’m a
doctor. I provide abortion care because I’m committed to the health and well-being of my patients.
When I finished my residency and moved to Arizona in the
late-1980s to join a multi-specialty practice as an OBGYN, it didn’t occur to me that I was taking
my career into the middle of a civil rights struggle — nor did I realize that the
greatest challenge of my career would be concern for the safety of my family.
Shortly after joining the practice, I found abortion equipment in
a closet at our offices. When a patient needed to terminate a pregnancy, I
offered a safe avenue to do so. When news that a doctor in our offices was
providing abortions spread through the community, anti-abortion protesters
began targeting our practice, and I was reprimanded by others in the office.
I’d assumed
that the presence of abortion equipment meant it was okay to provide abortion
care to my patients. I didn’t know
then what was obvious in retrospect: that someone had long been conducting
abortions on the sly. The problem wasn’t that I was providing abortions to women who needed them; it was that I was doing so in the
open.
The episode opened my eyes to how politicized and absurd
discussions around women’s
reproductive health have become. Because the abortion debate today isn’t, in the end, even about
abortion, or reproductive health, or women’s rights. It’s about
transparency, and whether abortion is safe and legal — or driven
underground.
We have moved past the
idea that you can stop someone from having an abortion by standing in front of
my office with a sandwich board. A woman who wants to end a pregnancy will find
a way to do so. Anyone who thinks that they have any influence on a woman’s choice to end a pregnancy is
mistaken. What anti-abortion activists — and the politicians who
exploit the issue to raise money and drum up votes — can influence
is whether or not the procedure is conducted in the safety of a doctor’s office or in the proverbial
back alley.
In recent years, we’ve seen state legislatures around the country pass various
senseless and demeaning restrictions on abortion access — mandatory
waiting periods, forcing a patient to look at a sonogram, onerous regulations
aimed at forcing women’s health
clinics out of business. Such laws have no medical significance and certainly
have nothing to do with keeping abortions safe for women. And, none of them can
stop abortions from taking place — they can only drive them into
the shadows.
Amid an ongoing onslaught on reproductive rights by craven
politicians, women’s health
advocates have to stay vigilant to make sure doctors like me can continue to
offer the care our patients need. To keep abortion safe and legal, we need to
be sending the message that these decisions ought to be made in a doctor’s office and should not be
played out politically.
Supporters should also be strong proponents of comprehensive,
medically accurate sex education to ensure that young people learn how to avoid
getting into a situation in which they may need an abortion. Here in the state
of Arizona, you have to opt in to accurate sex ed. In other words, you have to seek
it out — if you don’t do anything, nothing will happen. That’s not the way things should be.
When I turned 40, I decided to open my own practice, and providing
abortion care was an obvious niche I could fill. I didn’t start my practice as a political statement, but as a doctor concerned for my patients. Here in Arizona, it’s effectively illegal to provide abortion training at a publicly
funded residency. Offering skilled abortion care made obvious sense, because there aren’t many people around here who do. When I need medical attention, I don’t go to a governor’s mansion, a state legislature, or Capitol Hill; I go to a doctor’s office, where discussions about
medical care belong.