NRL News
Page 7
October 2006
Volume 33
Issue 10

Yale Medical Students Train at Planned Parenthood
BY Liz Townsend

Residents at the Yale School of Medicine, required to have abortion training unless they have religious or moral objections, now take a six-week course in abortion techniques at a Planned Parenthood of Connecticut (PPC) facility, according to Yale Daily News.

The collaboration between Yale and PPC began in 2005, when professors realized that the residents were performing “too few” abortions at Yale-New Haven Hospital, the Daily News reported. At PPC’s Whitney Street abortion clinic, “they are trained in both vacuum aspiration and medication abortion procedures,” according to Planned Parenthood’s Choice! magazine, along with other clinic “services.”

PPC officials enthusiastically praised the program. “Yale is very satisfied with the experience and training the residents are receiving at PPC and are especially happy with the number of patients the residents see,” Mary Bawza, chief operating officer of PPC, told Choice!. “After our first year we have learned a great deal about running a residency program and look forward to the next round of residents.”

Yale professors criticized the school’s abortion training before the PPC collaboration, bemoaning the limited opportunities to do abortions. “We did some abortions,” Prof. Susan Richman told the Daily News. “But those of us who wanted more training always had to go to Planned Parenthood.”

Not everyone at Yale supports the Planned Parenthood training. “If physicians take the Hippocratic Oath—which in its classical version explicitly prohibits abortions—or believe that life begins at conception,” Yale pre-med student Stephen Kappa told the Daily News, “then requiring them to learn and practice abortions amounts to nothing less than a coerced violation of that oath and their beliefs.”

Despite the professed opportunity for residents to opt out of abortion training, all six residents in the program last year participated in the abortion program, the Daily News reported.

Other Planned Parenthood affiliates are following Connecticut’s lead and partnering with local universities to train students in abortion. Over 150 physicians and residents are currently training at 37 Planned Parenthood affiliates, according to the Daily News.