The term, that is, not what it describes.
Warren Hern, who “specializes in abortions late in pregnancy,” is the subject of a profile in the Atlantic by Elaine Godfrey. The article is commendable for its candid departure from the abortion-lobby line, repeated ad nauseum by Democratic politicians and “fact-checking” journalists, that abortions late in pregnancy are always because of severe medical abnormalities: “Hern estimates that at least half, and sometimes more, of the women who come to the clinic do not have these diagnoses.”
At one point, the profile goes into a terminological issue. Godfrey writes,
Hern bristles at the label abortion doctor. Too simplistic, he says. He will correct you if you use it. He is a physician, he says, who happens to specialize in abortion. Worse still is abortionist. He remains angry about a 2009 story in Esquire in which the author referred to him that way, again and again. It’s a pejorative, Hern says. He is more than his profession, he needs you to know. He is many things: an anthropologist, an epidemiologist, an adopted son of the Shipibo Indians in Peru.
Hern has two complaints about the term. Let’s start with the alleged reductiveness of referring to someone in terms of one facet of his life. This is unreasonable to the point of being weird. Nobody thinks, on being told that someone is a banker, journalist, or welder, that this description fully captures the personality, interests, and social roles of the person so labeled. In some contexts, it will not be the most relevant descriptor — if I’m at my daughter’s soccer game, I’d expect to be introduced as “Betsy’s dad” first and foremost. But in many contexts, it’s perfectly fine to describe someone in terms of job or occupation. Godfrey talks about Hern’s photography, but his photos aren’t the reason she profiled him.
The pejorative connotations of “abortionist,” meanwhile, are entirely a function of what abortion is. (It’s not the “-ist,” obviously: Nobody thinks it rude to call people cardiologists, neonatologists, podiatrists, and the like; that 2009 Esquire story called it “a simple descriptive term” while noting Hern’s objection.)
Other descriptions mitigate those connotations only by being less efficient and direct, or drawing on associations with a larger group of people without the tight connection to abortion. E.g., “a physician who specializes in abortion.” Based on the profile, and other stories in which Hern has been quoted, he does not appear to be someone who is ashamed of what he does for a living. Perhaps his linguistic fastidiousness is his only behavioral trace of the suspicion that he should be.