Article on declining number of doctors with basic abortion-provision skills.

[moominmuppet]

This is one of my great concerns, in regards to access to abortion in the US. All the rights in the world do us no good if there are no providers.

Papayas Fill Gaps in Doctors' Abortion Training
Run Date: 06/16/08
By K. Aleisha Fetters
WeNews correspondent
Medical Students for Choice has been working since 1993 to support abortion providers and de-stigmatize the procedure among medical students. As the supply of abortion providers dwindles, it sees its mission as more urgent than ever.

(WOMENSENEWS)--With instruments in one hand, hundreds of medical students took papayas in the other.

Inserting a speculum into the tapered end of the uterine-shaped pieces of fruit, they injected them with numbing medication and gently scraped away their seed-filled lining.

This, they learned at the 15th annual meeting of Medical Students for Choice, is how easy it is to perform an abortion, a procedure that many of their schools will never teach them.

"Abortion is a very basic medical procedure," keynote speaker Alta Charo, a professor of law and medicine at the University of Wisconsin, told April's gathering of about 400 medical students and providers in Minneapolis-St. Paul. "The U.S. has trained doctors in ignorance."

Since the early 1980s, the number of U.S. abortion providers has declined from nearly 3,000 to about 1,700.

Even though an estimated 35 percent of U.S. women will have at least one abortion by age 45, 87 percent of the nation's counties currently have no provider, according to the New York-based Guttmacher Institute.

That dearth threatens to intensify, as 57 percent of abortion providers will retire within the next decade, according to Medical Students for Choice, and only 5 percent of U.S. medical students receive comprehensive sexuality education in women's overall reproductive health, which includes understanding which medications can harm a developing fetus.

To help keep the training gap from getting worse, Medical Students for Choice works with institutions around the country to put students in programs where they can shadow abortion providers and learn about both medical and surgical abortion. (more at the link...)