GOP’s Secret Anti-Choice Plot: The Shady Crackdown on Training Abortion Doctors

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http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/gops-secret-anti-choice-plot-shady-crackdown-training-abortion-doctors?akid=10963.277129.1Y3NxR&rd=1&src=newsletter899822&t=13



As terrible as the last few years have been for reproductive rights in the United States, growing extremism among antiabortion politicians has resulted in unprecedented awareness of these issues and a groundswell of public support for abortion rights. Wendy Davis’ marathon filibuster, bolstered by her Democratic colleagues and the thousands of Texans who showed up at the Capitol day after day, turned the state’s sweeping new abortion law and Gov. Rick Perry into national symbols for the right’s fixation on policing women’s bodies. The same could be said of Mississippi, Arkansas, North Dakota and elsewhere in the country. As a result of these battles, we now know the names, faces and strategies behind the American antiabortion movement, and that knowledge is a powerful thing.

But there is another threat to women’s access to abortion happening right now, and it is largely missing from how we talk about the war on reproductive rights: The number of doctors who perform abortions in this country has been steadily declining for decades, and medical schools aren’t training enough students to replace them.

“There are a lot of reasons why reproductive healthcare is not well covered in medical school curricula,” Lois Backus, executive director of Medical Students for Choice, tells Salon. “But among the most serious causes is the fact that reproductive health topics are still a source of controversy. Even though abortion is the second most common procedure experienced by women of childbearing age, it is routinely ignored in medical education.”

According to data from the National Abortion Federation, nearly 70 percent of medical students in the United States have received less than 30 minutes of class training about abortion by the time they finish medical school. This disregard for reproductive health education is an experience Dr. Nancy Stanwood, associate professor and section chief of Family Planning at the Yale School of Medicine and board chair of Physicians for Reproductive Health, remembers well. “We spent literally an hour and a half learning about birth control in two years of lectures,” she says. “We spent more time on cochlear implants — an important, but far less common, procedure.”