One woman gave birth to a baby, then, several years later, had a late-term abortion because the baby would have been born with a disability. Later, the woman expressed no guilt about the abortion. However, she developed negative feelings toward the abortionist, who was the same doctor who had delivered her first child:
He delivered my daughter. I mean, how could he do both things, deliver Liza one year, and kill it [the aborted baby] the next? It was confusing. After that, I didn’t want him to be my doctor anymore. I actually changed to the nurse practitioners at the HMO.
Even though abortion was this woman’s choice, she looked down on the doctor who killed her baby. She went so far as to stop seeing him, switching to nurse practitioners instead to avoid the trauma of seeing the abortionist again.
Abortionists are often resented even by the women who go to them, and many women who have abortions want to forget the abortionists as soon as possible. This may mean never going to the doctor who performed the abortion again for any other reason. This may be why most doctors who commit abortions do little else. Abortionist Kate Guthrie writes:
You get no thanks for performing abortions, you get spat on. Who admits to friends at a dinner party that they are an abortionist? It is not a sexy area – it is a bog standard area of women’s care.
Stigma and resentment among patients are two reasons why few doctors want to do abortions. There is a shortage of abortion providers, and relatively few doctors perform them. Only 14% of American OBGYNs commit abortions, according to one study. Another study found that only five out of 100 OBGYNs were willing to commit abortions. A poll found that the majority of doctors who commit abortions do four or less a year, meaning the great majority of abortions are done by relatively few doctors.
Another abortionist talks about how some of his patients resent him — and he doesn’t seem to feel very positive about his patients either.
There are a lot of tears. Sometimes patients turn on you. They say, “Let’s get out of here,” after the abortion, as if you’re some dirty person. It’s vicious. Then you get these teenyboppers in the office who laugh their way through it. It doesn’t mean a thing to them. That bothers me.
When you consider that half of abortion patients don’t show for their follow-up appointments, it becomes clear that many women having abortions want to forget their experience as soon as possible. They do not want to return to the ‘scene of the crime,’ or revisit the place where they suffered and lost their babies.
Many women who have not had abortions will refuse to see an abortionist for routine care, even if the abortionist offers legitimate reproductive health services in addition to abortion. A number of abortionists have commented on how after they became known as abortion providers, their other business dried up.
All this works to isolate abortionists from the mainstream medical community. Increasingly isolated, abortionists sacrifice their reputation and mainstream medical practice for the money they can make specializing in abortions.
