By the time of Roe, a majority of the medical community supported legal abortion — but not necessarily those who provided it, who remained stigmatized and thought to be more closely associated with a back-alley quack than a respected medical professional. Beyond their discomfort with abortion providers, the largely White, male and conservative medical profession of that era was ambivalent about incorporating abortion care for other reasons.
The threat that abortion posed to conventional medical authority was one. As a doctor complained at an American Medical Association (AMA) meeting in 1970, where legalization was under discussion, “Legal abortion makes the patient truly the physician: she makes the diagnosis and establishes the therapy.” That this scenario would typically involve a female patient dictating a course of treatment to a male doctor only compounded the discomfort in an era when medical authority was almost entirely reserved for men and motherhood was considered normative for women.
Moreover, the evident association of abortion with social movements — both for and against legal abortion — was disturbing to many in a conflict-averse profession. On one hand, many in medicine were less than sympathetic to the feminist activists demanding “abortion on demand” in the years leading up to Roe. On the other hand, four days after the Roe decision was announced, the Church amendment, which offered “conscience protections” for health-care workers who refused to participate in abortion, was reintroduced in Congress (and passed several months later). This quick action sent a signal that this procedure would be more scrutinized than the rest of medicine.
What is striking about the years after Roe affirmed a constitutional right to abortion were the measures that were not taken.
Very few medical organizations took the steps that would normally be expected after a major policy change. Most medical groups issued no guidelines, standards or even statements of support. Leaders within OB/GYN did not make any effort at education, for legislators or the general public, about the health benefits of legal abortion. Most significantly, the organizations charged with establishing residency requirements in OB/GYN did not mandate routine training in abortion for another 20 years. Even then, Congress immediately weakened the mandate. In short, at a crucial time, medical leaders passed on the opportunity to fully integrate abortion care into mainstream medicine.
The significant violence and harassment that is now central to abortion politics in America did not begin in earnest until 1988, some 15 years after Roe, when a new organization, Operation Rescue, began blockades and clinic invasions. Days before the first abortion doctor was assassinated in 1993, Randall Terry, the organization’s founder, told a crowd, “We’ve found the weak link is the doctor. … We’re going to expose them, we’re going to humiliate them.”