 Med schools recruiting
future
abortionists
Caroline
Mitchell, a second-year medical student at Harvard Medical School,
isn't quite sure if she wants to practice in a city or back home in
rural Vermont, or if she will even go into an obstetrics-gynecology
residency.
But she does know that she wants her practice to
include abortions.
Mitchell is one of a group of medical
students who are committed to doing something about reduced
abortions. Their concern is that there has been a downward trend in
abortions, which they feel is due to a decline in availability of
abortions at hospitals and clinics. Also, practicing doctors who
have performed abortions have often stopped for a range of reasons,
from fear for their safety to simple retirement to a change in heart
on the issue.
The students, including Mitchell, have banded
together to call for increased instruction in medical school and
residency programs through a national organization, the 4,000
student-strong Medical Students for Choice.
This group's
advocacy helped spur the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical
Education to adopt a policy in 1995 that requires accredited
residency programs to provide "access to experience with induced
abortion," while allowing for residents and entire programs to be
exempt from this training for "religious or moral
reasons."
Reduction in abortions has been steady in the
1990s. Between 1992 and 1996, 338 hospitals and clinics quit
providing abortion services, according to a 1998 study by Alan
Guttmacher Institute. In 1997 (the most recent data), the Centers
for Disease Control said nearly 1.2 million women had abortions, the
lowest number since 1973.
In Boston, the Crittenton Hastings
House, which was the first licensed abortion provider in
Massachusetts in 1973, quit providing abortions earlier this
year.
The clinic closed because of "declining utilization of
the service, and there are other quality providers to meet the
needs," spokesman Chip Gavin said.
During the 1980s,
Crittenton Hastings provided about 7,000 abortions each year, Gavin
said. That dwindled down to 1,600 a year before it stopped last
month.
Opponents of abortion like Maryclare Flynn, executive
director of Massachusetts Citizens for Life, said training for the
procedure should not be in medical education.
"Medical
students are taking on quite a noble profession. It is only natural
for students studying to save life not to spend time learning
something that deliberately stops the human heart," said
Flynn.
But Debra Stulberg, who is Mitchell's classmate and
wants to be a family practioner who provides abortions, said that
medical students are so busy that if they are not exposed to it in
medical school, they will not seek out the information they need.
"You wouldn't tell students that if they want to learn how to remove
an appendix, they should seek it out on their own time," said
Stulberg.
Stulberg and her Harvard classmates are working to
have an abortion lecture that is now optional become
required.
At Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, one
of the hospitals that Harvard students rotate through, observations
of abortions are part of the third-year required rotation, but those
with "religious or moral reasons" can opt out, hospital spokesman
Bill Schaller said. Also, ob-gyn residents do a 10-week rotation
during which they spend one day a week training in abortion.
| |
The Tribune Papers