Word: msfc
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Dates: during 2001-2001
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Jody Steinauer founded MSFC after she and fellow med students at the University of California, San Francisco were mailed a slightly threatening booklet from an anti-abortion group. Weeks later, Dr. David Gunn, a Florida abortion provider, was shot outside his clinic. "It was a wake-up call," she says. At medical conventions that summer Steinauer set up exhibits for the new group and was swarmed by students...
...MSFC has made headway mainly through quiet but persistent lobbying, cajoling professors, for instance, into adding abortion to their lectures or persuading skittish deans to allow a student debate on the issue. At Harvard, MSFC students set up a lecture on abortion and then persuaded administrators to make it part of the mandatory curriculum. At Brown, students urged professors to update their lectures by adding RU 486 and other abortion advancements as topics. The group at the University of Texas-Southwestern, where administrators were originally wary of even allowing a chapter, successfully pushed for a fourth-year elective...
...students at some campuses, mainly in the South and Midwest, have had less success. Several chapters have had to use euphemistic names, like Students for Reproductive Health, and downplay their interest in abortion. At other places, MSFC says, campus administrators have refused to give permission to start chapters. Jane van Dis started an MSFC chapter at the University of South Dakota last year. "Both students and professors have warned me I might be putting my future in jeopardy," she says. Hostile classmates have called group members "baby killers," according to Van Dis, and the chapter received a bomb threat through...
...Some MSFC activists are motivated by their own experiences with abortion. But many join for reasons more educational than political, and plenty are themselves queasy about the procedure. Kerri Faughnan, a medical student at the University of Colorado, split her time in an ob-gyn elective between an in-vitro and an abortion clinic. Swinging between women desperately in love with their eight-week-old fetuses to others desperate to be rid of theirs left her discomfited by abortion. But she echoes others in arguing that with studies estimating that 43% of women will have an abortion by the time...
...most important test of MSFC begins now, as the first wave of members leave their residencies and launch their careers. Will they actually provide abortions? Will those who do be stuck in the specialty clinics that are easy targets for abortion opponents? Or will they lobby to perform abortions in hospitals or in their private offices as a small part of a larger practice? At least now, educated in the procedure, these students are equipped to choose...