By Dave Andrusko

Editor's note. Part Two makes you aware of a pro-abortion report from UNESCO. Please send your comments on Parts One and Two to daveandrusko@gmail.com. If you'd like, follow me on www.twitter.com/daveha

The headline read, "Abortion Stigma Affects Doctors' Training And Choices." Authored by the Washington Post's Sandra G. Boodman, its contents are as unoriginal as they are repetitive.

It's as if editors have programmed in a reminder notice that pops up automatically every four or five months on their computer screens to prod them-- hey, it's time again to lament the diminishing pool of physicians willing to trade in their stethoscopes for curettages. Isn't it amazing, isn't it awful?

Actually, what's amazing is after reading what comes out at conferences (admittedly it does not make its way into the popular press very often), or even what abortion "clinic" personnel will admit to reporters, that anyone can work in an environment of misery and despair and death.

Boodman makes the same point a thousand other similar stories have recycled. There are areas in the country, fortunately, where there are few or no abortionists. Which would be regrettable--from the pro-abortionist's of view--if this shrinking was merely a momentary blip on the screen. But it isn't. Quoting from the research of the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, Boodman writes, "the number of abortion providers dropped from 2,908 in 1982 to 1,787 in 2005. Eighty-seven percent of counties in the United States and 31 percent of metropolitan areas have no abortion services."

Let me quote two paragraphs from the story and quickly comment on what is really being said.

"I think for a lot of students right now, it's very hard to be confronted with the constant negative energy and constant fighting" that surrounds abortion, said Miller, who grew up in a southern Virginia city where antiabortion sentiment runs high. Just learning about the procedure at the state school in Richmond can be a challenge. Medical students who want training in the procedure usually must arrange an elective "externship" in Northern Virginia, she said.

Thirty-six years after it was legalized, abortion remains one of the most common procedures in American medicine -- and the most stigmatized. In 2005, 1.2 million abortions were performed, dwarfing the number of appendectomies (341,000), gallbladder removals (398,000) and hysterectomies (575,000). "There's this feeling it's dirty and should not be spoken about," said Miller. "It's hard to be brave and seek everything out yourself."

I know she would deny making them morally equivalent, but it's hard not to avoid the suggestion that if something is as commonly performed as appendectomies, gallbladder removals, and hysterectomies combined, it really oughtn't to be seen as "dirty" and something "not to be spoken about." But it is, for the simple reason that deep down (as former NARAL Executive Director Kate Michelman once blurted out in spontaneous moment of candor), " We think abortion is a bad thing. No woman wants to have an abortion." (Michelman subsequently denied making this remark to the Philadelphia Inquirer, but the newspaper had it on tape and refused to back down.)

The other important point, developed in the second half of the story at length, is that old-time abortionists really are men to be admired. And that even if there is "constant negative energy," more medical students today ought to join the ranks of the abortionists.

But they aren't, which is why pro-abortion organizations and the leadership of various medical guilds are forever trying to figure out ways to compel them to participate, to learn how to "terminate" pregnancies. For the former, we can be grateful, for the latter we must be vigilant to prevent.

There is very little investigation of the "stigma" surrounding abortion. But at the top of the list of reasons why fewer young doctors want anything to do with abortion is that people like you refuse to accept killing unborn babies as just another "procedure."

It is not medicine. Killing the most helpless, the most vulnerable among us, is the very antithesis of medicine.

Part Two