Doctors of Conscience: The Struggle to Provide Abortion Before and After Roe V. Wade

Both sides of the debate over legal abortions have invoked the images of the "back-alley butcher" and the coat hanger as a portrayal of abortionists in the years before the Roe v. Wade decision. Anti-abortionists use these symbols to portray abortionists as greedy, exploitative, and less than professional, while supporters of choice invoke them to warn of the jeopardy in which women's lives would be placed if abortion were recriminalized.

But the truth about pre-Roe abortion is often quite different. Carole Joffe interviews 45 health-care professionals who either provided safe abortions or access to them in those years, focusing on, as she puts it, "the mounting frustrations with anti-abortion legislation that led otherwise highly conventional physicians to various degrees of law breaking and law bending" and the impact that decision had on their personal and professional lives. These people got involved because they could not stand by while women suffered from poverty or health complications; for many, it was more a matter of profound internal religious questioning. "I felt the solution to God's problems, in the world, was through faith," says one doctor. "Through faith in God we'd find a way to solve these problems... God wasn't going to solve all our problems. We've got to solve them ourselves." Doctors of Conscience is a solid, well-rounded portrayal of several people who came to such decisions; as an informed document, it offers much clarity and insight into a highly controversial issue.