Harvard School of Public Health, Department of Society, Human Development and Health, 677 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, USA.
Soc Sci Med. 2011 Nov;73(9):1357-64. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2011.08.019. Epub 2011 Sep 10.
The stigma surrounding abortion in the United States commonly permeates the experience of both those seeking this health service as well as those engaged in its provision. Annually there are approximately 1.2 million abortions performed in the United States; despite that existing research shows that abortion services are highly utilized, women rarely disclose their use of these services. In 2005 only 1787 facilities that offer abortion services remained, a drop of almost 40 percent since 1982 (Jones, Zolna, Henshaw, & Finer, 2008). While it has been acknowledged that all professionals working in abortion are labeled to some degree as different, no published research has explored stigmatization as a process experienced by the range of individuals that comprise the abortion-providing workforce in the USA. Using qualitative data from a group of healthcare professionals doing abortion work in a Western state, this study begins to fill that gap, providing evidence of how the experience of stigma can vary and is managed within interactions in the workplace, in professional circles, among family and friends, and among strangers. The analysis shows that the experience of stigma for those providing abortion care is not a static or fixed loss of status. It is a dynamic situation in which those vulnerable to stigmatization can avoid, resist, or transform the stigma that would attach to them by varying degrees within selective contexts.
在美国，围绕堕胎的污名通常会渗透到寻求这项健康服务的人和提供这项服务的人的经历中。美国每年大约有 120 万例堕胎；尽管现有研究表明，堕胎服务的利用率很高，但很少有女性公开披露她们使用这些服务。2005 年，提供堕胎服务的机构仅剩 1787 家，自 1982 年以来下降了近 40%（Jones、Zolna、Henshaw 和 Finer，2008）。虽然人们已经认识到，所有从事堕胎工作的专业人员在某种程度上都被贴上了不同的标签，但没有发表的研究探讨过污名化是如何成为美国堕胎服务提供人员构成范围内的个人所经历的一个过程。本研究使用来自美国西部一个州从事堕胎工作的一组医疗保健专业人员的定性数据，开始填补这一空白，提供了证据表明，污名化的经历在工作场所、专业圈子、家庭和朋友之间以及陌生人之间的互动中是如何变化和管理的。分析表明，为堕胎护理提供服务的人所经历的污名并不是一种静态或固定的地位丧失。这是一种动态的情况，在这种情况下，那些容易受到污名化影响的人可以通过在特定环境中进行不同程度的选择，避免、抵制或改变可能会附加到他们身上的污名。
