Can abortion-rights activists return the procedure to mainstream medicine?

In the early 90s, anti-abortion activist Randall Terry declared doctors were "the weak link" in the fight against the procedure, The New York Times reports. Soon, the first of eight deadly attacks on doctors who perform abortion occurred, marking one facet of a shift of mainstream medicine away from abortions and leaving women seeking that type of care to go to specialty clinics operated by sympathetic feminists.

The in-depth Times magazine article goes on to report, "Over the last decade, abortion-rights advocates have quietly worked to reverse the marginalization encouraged by activists like Randall Terry. Abortion-rights proponents are fighting back on precisely the same turf that Terry demarcated: the place of abortion within mainstream medicine. This abortion-rights campaign, led by physicians themselves, is trying to recast doctors, changing them from a weak link of abortion to a strong one. 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" (Bazelon, 7/12).

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This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.