Dr. Carolyn Westhoff: A lot of these academic health centers, which is sad, were very content to let somebody else do it. And something that emerged, I’m not sure exactly when it emerged, was this realization with all the freestanding abortion clinics providing the great bulk of care, that they were completely separate from training institutions. And young doctors were not getting any abortion training, or family planning, contraception, for that matter.
Dr. Phil Darney: And their job is training and research, that’s how they’re different than other hospitals. And they weren’t doing either in family planning or abortion.
WESTHOFF: And medical schools weren’t teaching it.
Interviewer: So this is in the early ’80s when you all get together and realize, “These things are separated and we need to bring them together, and so we’re going to establish this?”
WESTHOFF: Well, I think there are a number of us– maybe into the ’90s– a number of us wrote papers about how nobody’s doing this teaching, residents aren’t getting any of this experience, right?
DARNEY: Yeah.
WESTHOFF: That was just at the residency level. I don’t know really who wrote about it, but it was quite obvious that there was no teaching about contraception and abortion at the medical school level. And that’s important too, because 94 percent of doctors are not going to be OB/GYNs, so you can’t wait for them to learn these things during residency.
INTERVIEWER: Can you take me through how this changes from the ’90s to now in terms of, now is it required as a part of medical school curriculum?
WESTHOFF: Not enough. Not enough. The American Medical Women’s Association had a big reproductive health initiative with the explicit goal of trying to get this–
DARNEY: Curriculum.
WESTHOFF: –curricular material into medical schools. I worked on that for a number of years. But the big thing is now– I mean, yes, the Ryan Program is very good for residents– but the big thing is, the fellowship has produced hundreds of well-trained people who deeply care about this, who are now populating these hospitals over much of the country. And so you’ve got the stakeholder now.
DARNEY: It took some struggle to get particularly abortion into the curriculum.
INTERVIEWER: How did you do it? At UCSF?
DARNEY: Well, an example would be, I’d given a lecture to the clinical clerks, who in the third year were required to take obstetrics and gynecology. So they would learn about contraception and abortion from our faculty. But they might go to a hospital as clinical clerks and not learn anything about it. So when David Grimes came to be the Chief– he was recruited there from CDC, he had been a resident at UNC, and you probably know about David. He was a key player in abortion provision in North Carolina. He realized there was no lecture to all of the medical students about abortion, and he said, “Well, if you won’t let me give a lecture to all of them about abortion, I’m leaving.”
INTERVIEWER: Wow.
