It’s not often you see large groups of physicians speaking out against abortion rights. Maybe it’s because their scientific training makes them less likely to accept the dictates of faith. Maybe it’s because they tend to be well-off financially, and wealthy people tend to be more liberal on social issues. Or maybe it’s simply because they don’t like outsiders telling them when they can and cannot perform medical procedures. Whatever the reason, though, anecdotally, the medical community has generally supported giving women the right to obtain abortions. In fact, it’s the one issue on which the medical community seems to lean most conspicuously to the left.
There are plenty of reasons to not oppose abortion other than political. For starters, how about a medical reason? Illegal abortion, widely practiced in this country prior to Roe vs Wade, is often lethal. Many of us have seen any number of young girls die from septic shock after such procedures. Or how about the fact that physicians work for their patients. Many of us have seen the lives of young women ruined by a teenaged pregnancy, a life sentenced by a very understandable mistake. Worse, most physicians are personally aware that the single most positive factor for a child’s healthy psychological development is being "wanted." Our prisons and mental hospitals are filled with "unwanted" children. Also, physicians, male and female, talk directly to women who have the problem of an unwanted pregnancy. We can’t hide behind our own "ideas" of what is "right". We have to deal with what is right for the patient in front of us. A healthy woman ovulates monthly for four decades. What is wrong with allowing her to decide when and if the time is right to have a child? It is in the best interest of the woman, her partner, and certainly the child.
If the author wanted to pick out a socioeconomic, political reason that physicians might not oppose abortion, one that comes to mind is that most are educated people who realize that unlimited population growth is an absurd idea – ultimately for public heath reasons. Sooner or later, we must institute population control world-wide, or build ourselves some big spaceships and find some other planets that will support our children.
While the rest of the article is fine with me, the suggestion that abortion is really a political or religious issue rather than a medical one is annoying, and the stereotyping of physicians as liberal, or rich, or stubborn is insulting. It reminds me of my reaction to the hourly ads that say, "Ask your doctor if ___ is right for you." Do your doctor a favor. Don’t ask. Keeping up with medical science and all the modern blocks to decent medical practice is hard enough without having to field a gajillion questions generated by slick pharmaceutical ads.
I expect most physicians neither support nor oppose abortion. It’s the alternative to medically supervised abortion and concern for the physical and emotional health of children and women who do not yet want to be mothers that carries the day. The medical oath from Hippocrates is "do no harm." Forcing a pregnant woman who does not want a child to become a mother is "harmful" by any criteria…
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