Fewer Doctors Willing To Perform Abortions The Actions Of Protesters Make Physicians Increasingly Fearful

The biggest obstacle to women seeking abortions today is not a line of protesters on a clinic sidewalk. Nor is it laws that limit access for teenagers and the poor.

It is finding a doctor.

Since the peak in 1982, the number of physicians in the United States willing to perform legal abortions has dropped 18 percent - from 2,908 to 2,380 in 1992, the most recent data available - according to surveys by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a New York advocacy group that compiles abortion statistics.

In fact, the number of providers in 1992 was lower than it had been since 1976, just three years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that women had the right to terminate unwanted pregnancies.

In California, which has the highest number of abortion doctors, the number dropped from a high of 608 in 1988 to 554 in 1992. Most observers believe the trend is continuing downward.

Doctors who do practice tend to stay in urban areas. A Guttmacher survey showed that 94 percent of the nation’s rural counties - and 84 percent of all counties - did not have an abortion provider.

Doctors who support abortion rights say the trend is alarming.

“The impact on women’s health when abortion is inaccessible is well documented,” said Vicki Saporta, executive director of the National Abortion Federation. “We really don’t have to go back 25 years to find tragic cases of women who die because they can’t get safe and legal abortions.”

Abortion foes, however, are elated by the shrinking doctor pool.

“Isn’t it great?” asked Troy Newman, the San Bernardino-based western regional coordinator for Operation Rescue. “(This is) the best news since Roe vs. Wade passed.”

Although there may be many reasons for the drop, both sides in the debate agree that anti-abortion groups have had a chilling effect on doctors’ willingness to perform the procedure.

From common forms of protest, like pickets and the Operation Rescue practice of labeling doctors “abortionists,” to the extreme - the clinic bombings and murder that are condemned by most anti-abortion groups - the focus has made doctors increasingly fearful.

“We target abortionists to expose them,” Newman said. “… We follow them everywhere and tell everyone who cares to listen that they kill children for a living.”

One Durango, Colo., doctor said there is further attrition among doctors who were most willing to do abortions - gynecologists who were practicing in the years before Roe vs. Wade.

“The doctors who were around when abortion was illegal - who saw the women who were mutilated or psychologically damaged by abortions - are gone,” Dr. Richard Grossman said. “They’re dying or retiring, so the motivation to keep abortion safe and legal is diminishing.”

They have not been replaced.

Across the country, only 12 percent of medical schools offer routine abortion training in residency programs, where young doctors train in specialties.

Another 56 percent offer optional classes for what doctors say is the most common surgical procedure performed on women in the United States.

UC-Davis sociologist Carole Joffe, who wrote “Doctors of Conscience,” said that despite the fact that most physicians say they support abortion rights, many are unwilling to live with the professional and social stigma that comes with performing abortions.

“Organized medicine has been sympathetic to abortion - not abortionists,” she said.

But there is a movement afoot that abortion-rights supporters hope will infuse new doctors into abortion practices.

Soon after the 1983 murder of Dr. David Gunn in front of his Florida abortion clinic, a group of medical students became outspoken about the lack of abortion training. They formed Medical Students for Choice, a group that in recent years has grown to about 4,000 students at roughly 100 medical schools nationwide.