De LeRoy Carhart travels anonymously, hires bodyguards in Washington and has been stalked in his home town airport of Omaha, Nebraska. One protester handed out leaflets to boarding passengers: "Is there a killer on this flight?" His work is picketed and his farm has been burned out.
Such is the venom with which he is regarded that neighbours and a local state senator have bought out the building which houses his medical clinic and are trying to evict him.
Dr Carhart is one of only three doctors in the state of Nebraska who will perform abortions - perfectly legally - after 16 weeks and this year he successfully took the state to the Supreme Court over its proposals to ban late "partial birth" abortions.
But he is lucky to be alive. Other abortion clinic workers have been shot dead by the more extreme fringes of the antiabortion movement.
Ostensibly it's an issue which deeply divides the presidential candidates, and on paper it does. But the truth is somewhat more complex in a country in which a majority now readily accepts abortion as a reality, albeit one they might not approve of. Last week Catholics for a Free Choice published the results of a poll which they said showed 66 per cent of Catholics now support legal abortion.
Behind the rhetoric of the extremists the thrust of the campaign, for all its bitterness, suggests that the US is moving towards a centrist consensus on an acceptance of the fact of abortion with continuing battles only about setting its limits.
At stake in the election, however, are still important arguments about late abortions, state funding, parental consent, the nature of sex education, the approval of abortion drugs like RU486 - recently approved - and a whole range of US foreign aid programmes where money has been made conditional on states not promoting abortion.
The Republican candidate, Governor George Bush, is a self-proclaimed "pro-lifer" who said when he was first elected governor in 1994: "I do not like abortions. I will do everything in my power to restrict abortions." And in the past he has called for a constitutional amendment to prohibit abortion except in cases of rape, incest and where the woman's life is threatened.
The Christian right which dominates his party, although not the electorate, has high hopes of him. But Mr Bush, who can be sure of their support whatever he does, has been spending time placating the middle ground.
The message is that as president he will not press to remove a woman's right to choose. "Abortion is not going to be outlawed until a lot of minds have been changed. And there's going to be abortions one way or the other," he has said.
Nor, he says, will he make opposition to the key Roe v Wade judgment a precondition for appointment to the Supreme Court. The court is currently balanced 63 against a reversal of that judgment recognising a woman's right to choose abortion, but 5-4 on many of the more difficult limits-to-access issues.
The pro-choice groups simply don't believe him, and one, Planned Parenthood, has for the first time in its 84-year history plunged into a presidential campaign with a war chest of $7 million for advertising campaigns.
And if Mr Bush is playing down his past positions, so too is Vice-President Gore, whose record in Tennessee in the 1980s was as a staunch anti-abortionist who opposed federal funding and said abortion was tantamount to taking life. Today he is a staunch defender of choice.
He admitted to one public meeting in Des Moines, Iowa: "There is more common ground on abortion than either side is willing to admit." But Mr Gore also says he would appoint only a supporter of a woman's right to choose to the Supreme Court.
Mr Gore, unlike Mr Bush, now also opposes congressional attempts to limit late "partial birth" abortions, a term employed by the anti-abortion movement to describe what are known as dilation and extraction abortions. The procedure involves the doctor partially delivering the foetus and then collapsing the skull by suctioning its contents.
Pro-choice groups say the procedure is rarely necessary and then only in unusual and particularly distressing circumstances. Both men are on opposite sides on whether parental consent should be required for a child's abortion and, although Mr Bush is unlikely to be able to reverse the legalisation of RU-486, he will certainly assist Republicans in Congress in their bids to reduce access to it.
Mr Bush has also said he does not support the use of federal taxpayers' dollars for abortion and abortion counselling in the US or internationally. The issue has become increasingly important in a number of states where antiabortion legislatures have been trying to muzzle pro-choice doctors and nurses working for state hospitals.