Abortion care as moral work: Ethical considerations of maternal and fetal bodies By JohannaSchoen (ed)., New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. 2022. 202 pp.

Abortion Care as Moral Work, a volume edited by historian of reproduction Johanna Schoen, is a timely exploration of the moral implications of abortion access, abortion care, and the institutions and individuals that provide it.Organized across four parts, the book explores providers, clinics, "conscience," and "the fetus" as key moral actors.Schoen's introduction to the book provides a historical overview of the provision of abortion care in the United States.This historicization continues through each of the four sections where Schoen introduces the medical, legal, and social advancements that shaped the moral work of abortion provision through the latter half of the 20th century.She traces what "providing abortions" looked like across changes in the legal and medical landscapes from the pre-Roe to post-Roe era, highlighting the antiabortion violence that irrevocably shaped the work.This historical setup provides a frame for beginning to think about why, given such physical and emotional demands, someone would volunteer to provide abortions.This question is at the heart of much scholarship about the moral and ethical work of being an abortion provider.The first section, "Providers," describes the "factors that led medical professionals to become involved in the provision of abortion care and of their experiences providing services in an increasingly politicized field" (13).This included how the traumatic experiences of helping people who experienced injury from illegal abortion pre-Roe led many physicians to enter the field of abortion care.The search for new abortion techniques-for example, the use of laminaria to induce abortion-was driven by a desire to expand access to different gestational ages and make the process more accessible.This links the development of medical technologies-a "scientific" endeavor-to the moral work involved in reproduction (i.e., Rapp, 1987).The chapters in the first two sections are all first-person accounts and reflections of the experience of providers and clinic directors: intimate looks into the moral motivations that drive people to provide abortions.Their sentiments can often be summed up by this quote from Lisa Harris, who said: "accused of having no conscience, I realized that my crisis of conscience would come if I didn't do abortion work, if I abandoned women who needed care.In other words, I was a 'conscientious provider'" (79).Turning the concept of "conscientious objection" on its head, abortion providers who lead with their ethical convictions borrow the idea of conscience from religious, antiabortion advocates and use it to frame the provision of abortion as the moral choice.This idea has been important in pushing back on