Dispatches from the Abortion Wars The Costs of Fanaticism to Doctors, Patients, and the Rest of Us

Surprising firsthand accounts from the front lines of abortion provision reveal the persistent cultural, political, and economic hurdles to access While "abortion wars" may bring to mind the very real threat of anti-abortion violence, this timely book shows how a pervasive stigma-cultivated by the religious right-operates less dramatically but just as effectively to impede access by shaming women and marginalizing abortion providers in their own professional communities. InDispatches from the Abortion Wars,reproductive-health researcher Carole Joffe immerses readers in on-the-ground stories of doctors grappling with the obstacles of providing abortion care for their patients, while also offering hope for a more compassionate standard of womenrs"s health care.

Carole Joffe is a professor at the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at the University of California-San Francisco, and a professor emerita of sociology at the University of California-Davis. She is the author of several other books, including Doctors of Conscience.

Preface
1 The Stigma of Abortion
2 “You Need a Community with You”: Becoming an Abortion Provider
3 The Clinics: Ground Zero in the Abortion Wars
4 Regulating Abortion
5 Hospital-Based Abortions: Chaos, Cruelty, and Some Accommodation
6 Abortion Patients and the “Two Americas” of Reproductive Health
7 “Every Woman Is Different”: What Good Abortion Care Looks Like
8 What Kind of America Do We Want?
Afterword: “Abortion Is a Perfectly Proper Noun”
Postscript The Legacy of George Tiller
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index