United Nations funded RH Reality Check Blog writer, Louisa Pyle from Medical Students for Choice writes about an angle that has not been covered too much in pro-life circles in her essay The Abortion Curriculum Has Left the Classroom. She notes that more and more medical schools are NOT including abortion in their curriculum.
Abortion is a shadow that wisps in and out of medicine, much like the quiet shadow of abortion in many women’s lives, not addressed directly, not discussed in coffee shops or over family dinner.
Why is it not being taught? She notes her own experience in med school:
At one time at my medical school, a state institution of strong reputation in the Deep South, the physician responsible for the classroom teaching in women’s reproductive health, “Dr. L,” included a full hour lecture on the medicine and science of abortion care in the OB/Gyn curriculum. She included her own stories of patients, the hooks on which we medical students hang all this physiology and chemistry in our overtaxed memories. Even so, the students of this relatively conservative locale responded with powerfully reproachful marks on the course feedback forms. As student feedback influences not only the next year’s teaching of any course but also the tenure and performance assessment of the teachers, physicians, themselves, Dr. L. was forced to remove the lecture. (emphasis mine)
Evidently students are pro-life, or at the very least may feel that while some doctors may choose to kill their patients they do not want to do that.
My absolute favorite line from Ms. Pyle is this quote:
Medicine today is “evidence-based.” Treatments must be proven, tested, and extensively evaluated – the application of the scientific method for the benefit of consumers of medicine. In this way we protect our patients from damaging or unproven treatments.
Ms. Pyle fails to note that it is PRECISELY because medicine IS evidence based that has made so many people of MY generation pro-life. She can speak all she wants of a woman’s right to choose, but that choice stands in stark opposition to a beating heart and a human body, as primitive as it is, that conveys to those doctors the cost of choice. There is something different about abortion than say an appendectomy, tummy tuck, or heart surgery. And evidently, our future doctors are saying “No thanks! Let someone else kill your kid for you.”
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