The Scarcity of Abortion Training in America’s Medical Schools - The Atlantic
▻http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/06/learning-abortion-in-medical-school/395075
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends that all medical schools offer opt-out abortion training, but the reality still lags behind the official guidelines. In a 2005 survey of U.S. medical schools in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, only 32 percent of respondents said they offer a formal lecture specifically about abortion as part of their OB-GYN rotation, and 23 percent reported “no formal education” about abortion at all. (Some schools that don’t have classes about abortion specifically may address the subject in classes on ethics or contraception.) In the same survey, 55 percent of medical schools reported that they offered students no clinical exposure to abortion.
The University of Arizona College of Medicine, for example, banned abortions at its facilities in the 1970s (except those performed to save the life of the mother) as part of an agreement with the state legislature that authorized $5.5 million to renovate the university’s football stadium. The state Supreme Court upheld the decision in 1976, and elective abortions in public university-affiliated hospitals are still illegal in Arizona. (Several other states, including Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Texas, also have laws in place that restrict or ban abortions in publicly funded institutions, including state universities.) How can future physicians decide they want to provide abortions if they’ve never seen one?