Arizona 'Medical Students for Life' Chapter Threatens Patient Health: 'This Contradicts What We Are
( a most disturbing, and important, article)
(the video can be accessed from the link below)
Arizona ‘Medical Students for Life’ Chapter Threatens Patient Health: ‘This Contradicts What We Are Taught in Our Curriculum,’ Say Students
3/15/2023 by Olivia Raisner
What’s happening at Midwestern University illustrates the anti-abortion movement’s larger strategy: disseminate misinformation to confuse, deter and scare people out of getting abortions.
There’s misinformation afoot at Midwestern University Arizona College of Osteopathic Medicine. I spent four days on campus earlier this month talking to medical students—and what I heard was harrowing. For the first time in school history, the administration overruled a student government vote in approving or rejecting an application for a new club to be allowed on campus. The vote in question? Whether or not to allow a chapter of the controversial Medical Students for Life (MSFL) to form on campus.
Student government’s reasoning for the vote had nothing to do with a disagreement about a moral stance on abortion. Rather, as a medical school educating future doctors, they felt it was dangerous to establish an organization notorious for disseminating medical misinformation. Examples of misinformation put forth by Students for Life includes: falsely claiming birth control pills are abortifacients, promoting abortion pill reversal (which is neither medically sound nor FDA-approved), claiming IVF is unethical and dangerous, and championing abstinence-only-until-marriage sex education that has not been shown to be effective. Put simply by Midwestern University’s Students for Choice members in a letter responding to the administration’s decision: “This contradicts what we are taught in our curriculum and … could directly put patients in our community at risk as students are on rotations and enter residency.” Despite student government’s vote, MSFL is now fully operational on Midwestern University’s medical campus.
What’s happening at Midwestern University illustrates the anti-abortion movement’s larger strategy: disseminate misinformation to confuse, deter and scare pregnant people out of getting abortions. They have classically achieved this by operating over 2,500 anti-abortion centers (AACs) nationwide. (Commonly called crisis pregnancy centers, or CPCs, the Associated Press has recently recommended this change in terminology to better reflect what these centers do.) And they often use government funding to achieve these goals—half a billion dollars having been funneled into AACs over the last ten years, much of it taxpayer dollars diverted from social safety net programs … all the while spreading medical misinformation and purposely targeting marginalized communities.
This time, however, the anti-abortion movement has reached new lows by trying to not only target patients but to try to directly influence the education of future physicians. This is clearly a conscious strategic decision to influence medical education to further exert influence and control and tie the hands of America’s future doctors. It’s already bad enough that almost half of ob-gyn residents are being trained in states that now ban abortion and thus have no local access to abortion training. We also know medical students are graduating grossly unprepared in this area, with a 2020 study showing that half of medical schools offer no abortion training or have only a single lecture on the topic.
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https://msmagazine.com/2023/03/15/medical-students-for-life-arizona-abortion/