Willing and Unable: Doctors' Constraints in Abortion Care (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780826517142)

Willing and Unable explores the social world where abortion politics and mainstream medicine collide. The author interviewed physicians of obstetrics and gynecology around the United States to find out why physicians rarely integrate abortion into their medical practice. While abortion stigma, violence, and political contention provide some explanation, her findings demonstrate that willing physicians are further encumbered by a variety of barriers within their practice environments.
Structural barriers to the mainstream practice of abortion effectively institutionalize the buck-passing of abortion patients to abortion clinics. As the author notes, "Public-health-minded HMOs and physician practices could significantly change the world of abortion care if they stopped outsourcing it."
Drawing from forty in-depth interviews, the book presents a challenge to a commonly held assumption that physicians decide whether or not to provide abortion based on personal ideology. Physician narratives demonstrate how their choices around learning, doing, and even having abortions themselves disrupt the pro-choice/pro-life moral and political binary.

Author: Lori R. Freedman
ISBN-10: 0826517145
ISBN-13: 9780826517142
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Language: English
Published: 08/09/2010
Pages: 200
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.95lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.00w x 0.90d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 02/01/2011