{"id":10572,"date":"2010-07-19T04:31:46","date_gmt":"2010-07-19T11:31:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=10572"},"modified":"2010-07-19T04:31:46","modified_gmt":"2010-07-19T11:31:46","slug":"two-articles-one-about-abortion-and-one-about-women-gender-sexuality-and-medicine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=10572","title":{"rendered":"Two Articles, One About Abortion and One About Women, Gender, Sexuality and Medicine"},"content":{"rendered":"

First, from The New York Times, <\/em>The New Abortion Providers:<\/a><\/p>\n

[After Roe vs. Wade,] the clinics also truly came to stand alone. In 1973, hospitals made up 80 percent of the country\u2019s abortion facilities. By 1981, however, clinics outnumbered hospitals, and 15 years later, 90 percent of the abortions in the U.S. were performed at clinics. The American Medical Association<\/a> did not maintain standards of care for the procedure. Hospitals didn\u2019t shelter them in their wings. Being a pro-choice doctor came to mean referring your patients to a clinic rather than doing abortions in your own office.<\/p>\n

This was never the feminist plan. \u201cThe clinics\u2019 founders didn\u2019t intend them to become virtually the only settings for abortion services in many communities,\u201d says Carole Joffe, a sociologist and author of a history of the era, \u201cDoctors of Conscience,\u201d and a new book, \u201cDispatches From the Abortion Wars.\u201d When the clinics became the only place in town to have an abortion, they became an easy mark for extremists. As Joffe told me, \u201cThe violence was possible because the relationship of medicine to abortion was already tenuous.\u201d The medical profession reinforced the outsider status of the clinics by not speaking out strongly after the first attacks. As abortion moved to the margins of medical practice, it also disappeared from residency programs that produced new doctors. In 1995, the number of OB-GYN residencies offering abortion training fell to a low of 12 percent.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnder pressure and stigma, more doctors shun abortion,\u201d wrote David Grimes, a leading researcher and abortion provider of 38 years, in a widely cited 1992 medical journal article called \u201cClinicians Who Provide Abortions: The Thinning Ranks.\u201d In a 1992 survey of OB-GYNs, 59 percent of those age 65 and older said that they performed abortions, compared with 28 percent of those age 50 and younger. The National Abortion Federation started warning about \u201cthe graying of the abortion provider.\u201d In the decade after Roe, the number of sites providing abortion across the country almost doubled from about 1,500 to more than 2,900, according to the Gutt\u00admacher Institute. But by 2000 the number shrank back to about 1,800 \u2014 a decline of 37 percent from 1982.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s another side of the story, however \u2014 a deliberate and concerted counteroffensive that has gone largely unremarked. 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\u2019s a seamless part of health care for women \u2014 embraced rather than shunned.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Second, from Newsweek.com,<\/em> The Anti-Lesbian Drug<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n
\n
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Genetic engineers, move over: the latest scheme for creating children to a parent\u2019s specifications requires no DNA tinkering, but merely giving mom a steroid while she\u2019s pregnant, and presto\u2014no chance that her daughters will be lesbians or (worse?) \u2018uppity.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Or so one might guess from the storm brewing over the prenatal use of that steroid, called dexamethasone. In February, bioethicist Alice Dreger of Northwestern University and two colleagues blew the whistle<\/a> on the controversial practice of giving pregnant women dexamethasone to keep the female fetuses they are carrying from developing ambiguous genitalia. (That can happen to girls who have congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH)<\/a>, a genetic disorder in which unusually high prenatal exposure to masculinizing hormones called androgens can cause girls to develop a deep voice, facial hair, and masculine-looking genitalia.) The response Dreger got from physicians and scientists who were outraged over this unapproved use of dexamethasone caused her to dig deeper into the scientific papers of the researcher who has promoted it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Dreger is one of the women who brought the clitoral surgeries performed by Dr. Dix Poppas<\/a> to light.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First, from The New York Times, The New Abortion Providers: [After Roe vs. Wade,] the clinics also truly came to stand alone. In 1973, hospitals made up 80 percent of the country\u2019s abortion facilities. By 1981, however, clinics outnumbered hospitals, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abortion-reproductive-rights","category-gender-and-the-body"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10572"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10572\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}