Willing and Unable: Doctors' Constraints in Abortion Care (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780826517159)

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: 0826517153
ISBN-13: 9780826517159
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Language: English
Published: 08/09/2010
Pages: 200
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 8.80h x 6.00w x 0.60d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 02/01/2011
Reference and Research Bk News 11/01/2010 pg. 152