New story up at Conscience:
In an era of TRAP laws, misleading hidden camera campaigns and ongoing vigilante violence against abortion clinics and staff, it’s easy to wonder why any young doctor would want to become an abortion provider. The battles only seem to grow—from ever more restrictive state laws to the recent jailing of women on “feticide” charges—and providers perpetually stand on both the figurative and literal front lines. For years, this landscape has led to a bigger, more existential concern: that the generation of abortion providers who were radicalized by the horrors of back alley abortions and the siege mentality of opponents was aging out of their calling, and not enough new doctors were willing to take their place. Who, after all, would want to spend 10 years training in medicine only to graduate to a career filled with workplace protests, harassment of their clients and families and the chilling threat of an assassin’s bullet?
As early as 1992, providers and reproductive rights advocacy organizations began to warn about “the graying of the abortion provider.” But in recent years, that trend has begun to turn around, thanks largely to the organization Medical Students for Choice…
