New York Magazine has a fascinating article—”The Abortion Distortion: Just How Pro-Choice is America, Really?“—that among other things, looks at the way even abortion providers feel abortion’s moral weight. While the writer Jennifer Senior supports abortion, she looks at America’s discomfort with abortion, the fact that Americans now seem more eager to label themselves pro-life, the statistics that show that crisis pregnancy centers now outnumber abortion providers, and legislation that has shifted public opinion towards valuing life. Even abortion providers recognize that the issue isn’t as neat as their rhetoric might lead you to believe:

And if you want to hear honest talk about the realities of abortion, go speak with those abortion counselors and providers. Even the most radically pro-choice will tell you that the political discourse they hear about the subject, with its easy dichotomies and bumper-sticker boilerplate, has little correspondence to the messy, intricate stories of her patients. They hear about peace and guilt, relief and sin. And it is they who will acknowledge, whether we like it or not, that the rhetoric and imagery of the pro-life movement can touch on some basic emotional truths. Peg Johnston, who manages Access for Women in upstate New York, remembers the first time her patients unconsciously began to co-opt the language of the protesters outside. “And it wasn’t that these protesters were brainwashing them,” she says. “It’s that they were tapping into things we all have some discomfort about.”