Unfortunately, messing with reproductive rights continues.
Mara Gordon at
The Atlantic writes—
The Scarcity of Abortion Training in America's Medical Schools. An excerpt:
One of the reasons I went to medical school was to become an abortion provider—and, coming from a strongly pro-choice family, to use my medical training to increase abortion access in the U.S. I always assumed that my ability to do so was simply a matter of my willingness to perform the procedure. But in seeking out opportunities to learn about abortion—as a medical student, and now as a resident in family medicine—I have ended up in Philadelphia, where there are widespread abortion services, and where women don’t face the same barriers to abortion as they do in Kansas. As I think about the kind of doctor I want to be, I have to reckon with whether or not I have what it takes to serve the women who need me most.
* * *
When I started medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, the culture war surrounding abortion still seemed abstract and far away. I grew up attending pro-choice rallies with my physician mom in Washington, D.C., and all my parents’ doctor friends supported abortion rights.
My medical education seemed to confirm my false sense that everyone working in healthcare felt the way I did about abortion access: Abortion was discussed in class as openly as blood pressure and diabetes, and spending a day in family-planning clinic was an opt-out, not opt-in, part of our clinical education. Many of my professors who work in family medicine routinely perform abortions for their patients, so when I started to think more seriously about a career in primary care, I assumed that making abortion part of my practice would be an easy decision.
Then, during my third year of medical school, I attended that pro-choice conference where I met Chastine—and I also met students from schools very different than mine. One woman attending medical school in the Midwest told me she had lied to her friends about where she was that weekend. There was a man from the South who said his anti-abortion classmates celebrated when his obstetrician-gynecologist father—one of his town’s only abortion providers—unexpectedly passed away. A student from another East Coast medical school just a few hours away from mine described how one of his classmates had been written up for “professionalism concerns” for referring a patient to Planned Parenthood.
Meeting these medical students made my own experience suddenly come into focus: They had to fight to learn about abortion, while my own educational opportunities in reproductive health had simply fallen into my lap. The stigma attached to abortion providers doesn’t just come from clinic protestors or grotesque billboards. It can come from within our own profession, too. It can be overt—like the heartbreaking story of that student’s father’s early death—but it can also be more subtle, like a medical curriculum that doesn’t cover abortion care.
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.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2003—McKiernan's dilemma:
Lt. Gen David McKiernan faces a problem as old as Iraq: how to keep the tribes and various factions under control.
His methods have involved sweeps and nightly patrols in a war which may go on as long as Americans are in Iraq.
The White House and Defense Department are using loaded words like terrorists and Baathists, which may sound nice on Fox News, but does little to explain how complex the politics of Iraq are.
One must keep in mind Saddam used a complex series of bribes and a secret police establishment to work his magic. He rarely acted overtly, except when needed. But even he couldn't prevent a full-scale Shia uprising and many of the secret dead come from that period.
The US faces a grim series of realities and some military choices.
* We have no allies in Iraq.
Bremer forced Chalabi to disband his gang, the Free Iraqi Forces, and that was the people we trained. There is no one natural constituancy which the US can draw police, soldiers, administrators. The Kurds mistrust us a great deal, the Shia have never forgiven us for calling on them to rise and then abandoning them in 1991. There is no ruling class we can appoint. The Shia clerics would like us to appoint them as the ruling class, but their plans have a lot to do with creating the Islamic Republic of Iraq than any kind of pro-Israeli democracy in the PNAC fantasies. [...]
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