By taking jobs on university faculties, the young doctors avoid walking to work through a scrum of screaming demonstrators. “Some people like to live on the edge — I don’t,” said Emily Godfrey, a 40-year-old doctor who practices at a primary-care clinic at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she also does abortions. “I’m a Catholic girl from the suburbs. I’m a yoga student. I like calm and serenity.”

Godfrey is tall and graceful, with auburn hair and freckles. She decided as a child she wanted to be a doctor. In her favorite course as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, on the history of women in medicine, she read rejection letters that Harvard Medical School once wrote to women applicants who were turned down because they would someday marry. Godfrey started at the Medical College of Wisconsin in 1993, the same year that Jody Steinauer founded Medical Students for Choice. Godfrey put most of her extracurricular energy into working with domestic-violence victims. But as a third-year student, she went to an M.S.F.C. meeting at which an internist who did abortions suggested a book called “The Story of Jane.” It was about a few women in Chicago, in the years before Roe, who were furtively trying to help other women in their desperate search for illegal but safe abortions. Godfrey still has her copy. “Women had to meet strange men who were supposedly doctors in a hotel room or in somebody’s kitchen,” she recalled. “To ask a woman to show up secretly like that and hope some guy won’t take advantage of you — to me, it was horrible. I started thinking that I wanted to be the one to make sure that women in that situation could be dignified.”

After graduation, Godfrey started her family-medicine residency in a hospital on Chicago’s West Side. It bordered gang territory. On her obstetrics rotation, Godfrey delivered baby after baby to poor women who seemed overwhelmed. Some were drug addicts. “Bringing so many unwanted children into the world, or children who wouldn’t be readily provided for because their mothers were on drugs or who were taken away at birth — well, that just solidified my feeling that I wanted to provide abortions,” she told me. Godfrey read up on contraception and learned that IUDs can be safely inserted right after delivery. But Medicaid refused to pay for a delivery and this second procedure in one day. “Many of my patients were getting pregnant again, without intending to, and it was extremely frustrating,” she says.

When a friend gave her a flier about the Family Planning Fellowship, Godfrey saw it as a way to learn a skill she wanted to have, try her hand at research and travel abroad. Most Family Planning fellows are OB-GYNs; Godfrey was one of the first family-medicine doctors in the program. Family physicians deliver babies, set broken arms, remove precancerous moles. Because they’re more likely than specialists to work in rural areas, they are for abortion-rights advocates the best hope of bringing more providers to the parts of the country where hundreds of miles roll by without one.

Godfrey spent the two years of her Family Planning Fellowship at the University of Rochester, where she did enough abortions to “train to competency,” the term for doing a sufficient number of supervised abortions to be fully qualified to do the procedure alone. The rate of complication for first-trimester abortions that require hospitalization is so low (fewer than 1 in 100) that doctors often have to do the procedure scores of times to learn what to do when something goes wrong.

Godfrey also went to Nicaragua and Mexico to learn about those countries’ reproductive-health services and to the World Health Organization in Geneva to do research. Now she’s publishing W.H.O. data on using the IUD, inserted after unprotected sex, as emergency contraception. (It works surprisingly well, though it’s not yet entirely clear how.) The fellowship’s international component means that young doctors see the kind of suffering that their predecessors saw in the U.S. before Roe. “In Kenya, a woman came with a stick hanging out of her,” says one doctor whose fellowship took her to Africa so she could train nurses to treat complications from illegal abortions. “You bring in this inexpensive, reusable equipment to places without electricity or running water, and you teach nurses to use it, and you save women’s lives.”

The first fellowship-trained doctors mostly took jobs in cities that were already flush with abortion providers — San Francisco, New York, Boston. Now positions in those places are filled, and the fellowship alums, who number more than 20 per year, are spreading out. In Chicago and even Rochester, there isn’t one lone fellowship-trained physician. There are clusters. They go out for drinks together. Nationally, the fellows have annual meetings and an e-mail list on which they ask one another’s advice. “More than anything, what’s hard about this work is that there aren’t a lot of people you can talk to about it,” says Sunni, a colleague of Godfrey’s and a 40-year-old OB-GYN whose parents immigrated to the United States from South Asia. “That’s probably the most important thing we do for each other.”