{"id":219617,"date":"2020-03-06T14:19:24","date_gmt":"2020-03-06T20:19:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.liveaction.org\/news\/?p=219617"},"modified":"2020-05-15T13:43:38","modified_gmt":"2020-05-15T18:43:38","slug":"abortion-industry-no-longer-between-woman-doctor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/abortion-industry-no-longer-between-woman-doctor\/","title":{"rendered":"If the abortion industry has its way, abortion will no longer be ‘between a woman and her doctor’"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Remember the oft-repeated mantras, “Abortion should be between a woman and her doctor” and “abortion should be safe<\/em>, legal, and rare”? These are rapidly changing.<\/p>\n

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Abortion mantra between a woman and her doctor (Image: Twitter)<\/p><\/div>\n

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Abortion mantra between a woman and her doctor PPAct (Image: Twitter)<\/p><\/div>\n

Today, the industry has lowered the standard of care for women by passing laws allowing non-physicians to commit abortions — including nurses, certified nurse-midwives, and physicians’ assistants. The move has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with the fact that fewer and fewer doctors wish to provide abortions.<\/p>\n

Below is a timeline that shows the decline over the years in the percentage of physicians who were willing to commit abortions:<\/p>\n

1985 <\/strong>–\u00a0Writing in\u00a0the Jacobs Institute of Women’s Health in 1993<\/a>, Philip Darney<\/a> referenced<\/a> a 1985 survey of Fellows of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists which revealed that only 34% did abortions<\/strong>. “84% said abortion was necessary in at least some circumstances, whereas only 13% said it should never be done.\u00a0These figures are little changed from a survey of 14 years earlier.”<\/p>\n

2007<\/strong>\u00a0– A survey<\/a> of OBGYNs published<\/a>\u00a0by the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology (AJOG) in 2007, found that of 2,149 respondents,\u00a0only 22% had provided elective abortion<\/strong> in the previous year. “Abortion training in obstetrics-gynecology residency programs declined from 1985-1992, and the number of providers declined by 70 per year from 1992-2000,” the authors wrote. Out of 474 abortion provider responses, 319 (67%) were female.<\/p>\n

2008-2009<\/strong>\u00a0– A\u00a0survey<\/a>\u00a0which queried 1,800 practicing OBGYNs from October 2008 to January 2009 was published<\/a> by ACOG’s Green Journal in 2011. Responses from 66% of those surveyed revealed that\u00a0just 14% performed abortions<\/strong>, citing how “abortion training decreased steadily over the two decades before 1996” as a reason. Of abortion provider responses, 60.7% were female and 39.3% were male.<\/p>\n

2010<\/strong>\u00a0– Efforts to increase abortion training began.\u00a0A 2010 report published<\/a> by Emily Bazelon<\/a>\u00a0in\u00a0<\/span>New York Times Magazine detailed an effort to increase abortion providers. She wrote:<\/p>\n

In 1999, Uta Landy<\/a>, a former director of the National Abortion Federation, and Philip Darney, her husband and an OB-GYN professor at U.C.S.F., created the Kenneth J. Ryan Residency Training Program<\/a>. The program gives medical schools two or three years of seed money for abortion training for OB-GYN residents…. The money for the Ryan and the Family Planning Fellowship comes from one foundation and from one family. The donor has chosen to remain anonymous, which helps to explain why there\u2019s been so little publicity about the pro-choice strategy of bringing abortion into academic medicine. It has been covered by a veil of semisecrecy.”<\/em><\/p>\n

But further down in the piece Bazelon noted<\/a>\u00a0the “anonymous donor” to the Ryan and Family Planning Fellowships was the Buffett Foundation, an original investor<\/a> in abortion pill manufacturer DANCO Laboratories. The Buffett Foundation\u00a0funds<\/a>\u00a0abortion expansion today:<\/p>\n

In the course of my reporting, two doctors who had not done the fellowship themselves, but who work in universities, volunteered to me that the money for the programs comes from the Buffett Foundation…Warren Buffett gave the foundation about $3 billion. He said that he expected the gift to increase the foundation\u2019s annual expenditures by $150 million. And in fact, total giving by the foundation, where two of the Buffetts\u2019 children sit on the board<\/strong>, increased from $202 million in 2007 to $347 million in 2008, according to tax returns…In 2006, Buffett announced his $3 billion gift to the foundation in a letter that\u2019s written in a kind of code.<\/em><\/p>\n

2016-2017<\/strong>:\u00a0Buffett’s investment into the previously mentioned Ryan abortion training program likely led to an uptick in abortion providers between 2009 and 2016, and a report published<\/a>\u00a0in 2019 by the LA Times cited a more recent survey of U.S. OBGYNs.\u00a0That cross-sectional survey<\/a>\u00a0conducted from 2016\u20132017 from a national sample of ACOG Fellows was\u00a0published<\/a> in ACOG’s Green Journal. It found:<\/p>\n