North Carolina state Rep. Pat McElraft is sponsoring legislation that will prevent medical schools in the state from training doctors in how to perform abortions.
You’re thinking “Who cares? I’m not stuck in the fetid swamp known as the Tar Heel State.” But it does matter, since the University of North Carolina is one of the country’s top five OB-GYN residency programs, so there’s a fair chance your OB-GYN trained there.
Oh well, it’s back to the coat hanger. Only this time, it will be wielded by an actual M.D.
I live in that unfortunate state where Rep. McElraft campaigns against teaching medical students to perform abortions. I hope it’s just posturing, a late-comer clamoring for a front seat on the right-to-life bandwagon. Even if she’s successful, the statistics claim that “the number of OB-GYN residencies [in the US] offering abortion training [had already fallen] to a low of 12 percent” in 1995. [ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/magazine/18abortion-t.html ] No Ob/Gyn, no abortion.
The crushing cost of malpractice insurance will aggravate the shortage of Ob/Gyn physicians in general. In 2007, one Rockingham County obstetrician’s insurance bill came to $250,000/year — and it had nothing to do with prior lawsuits. He folded up his independent practice tent and took shelter under the Moses Cone Health System’s roomy umbrella. In 2008, Annie Penn Hospital — one of two community hospitals in RC — closed its Ob/Gyn department. Over 90 years, Annie Penn doctors had delivered three generations of babies into many local families.
In some states, Ob/Gyns have to maintain malpractice insurance for 21 years after their last delivery. “The 2003 American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) survey reported that 14 percent of respondents stopped practicing obstetrics as a result of the risk of litigation.”* And let’s not forget that in the U.S. Ob/Gyns who do perform abortions get shot and blown up in their clinics and their cars, distinctions unique to their medical specialty.
* “The Impact of Malpractice Risk on the Use of Obstetrics Procedures,” Beomsoo Kim, June 2006.