America has many great and technologically advanced hospitals which are utilized every day for all types and kinds of medical procedures and surgeries. Additionally, we also have many small medical centers that attend to the normal day-by-day checkups and routine procedures that are necessary to verify that one's health is satisfactory; it seems rather strange though, a bit out of sorts, that we also have abortion clinics that are stand-alone centers throughout most of our country. You would think, logically, that since there are over one million abortions that are performed in this country each year, of which the procedure involved to carry out the abortion varies significantly depending upon the length of time since conception, that it would be safer, and far more effective, to have those abortions done within a hospital as opposed to an abortion clinic which often has no full-term medical doctor on staff.
Somewhat surprisingly, we find that when we go back in time to the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973, abortions in this country actually were commonly performed in hospitals, to which 80% of abortions were performed in hospitals in 1973, whereas today over 90% of abortions are performed in clinics specifically setup to handle what is an Obstetrician-Gynecologist surgical procedure. Not only have abortions moved out of the hospitals to abortion clinics, but according to the NY Times, "in 1995, the number of OB-GYN residencies offering abortion training fell to a low of 12 percent." These above actions clearly indicate that it is medical doctors themselves, which have clearly retreated from providing abortion on demand.
Hospitals have turned their back on performing abortions within their facilities for many reasons. For instance, abortion is at best the termination of the embryonic phase of the normal development of a human fetus, and is at worst a form of infanticide. This, in of itself, screams of being of a procedure which is at loggerheads with the primary purposes of any hospital which is to help alleviate pain and suffering, to do what is necessary to extend and to save life, and in those circumstances to which physical life has reached its end stages, to provide dignity and care to their patients. Additionally, protestors against abortion have become quite knowledgeable and vocal in demonstrating their disapproval of abortion through the picketing of hospitals in order to shed light and to embarrass the hospital administration into making changes; this becomes especially effective and poignant whenone recognizes that often a considerable and meaningful portion of the very people that work within the hospital itself, such as doctors, nurses, and the administrative staff, are not themselves supporters of abortion within that hospital.
This means that hospitals will probably not soon again become a ready avenue for abortions in America. Instead, abortions will continue to be done in stand-alone clinics throughout most of America, and the motivated protestors against such clinics will continue to pick them off, one-by-one, with certain medical doctors reduced to surreptitiously plying their trade like thieves in the night.